title: The effect of number of siblings on adult mortality: Evidence from Swedish registers for cohorts born between 1938 and 1972.
abstract: Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938-72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden.
authors.affiliation: a Warsaw School of Economics.|b Umeå University.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Baranowska-Rataj
authors.affiliation: c Stockholm University.|d London School of Economics & Political Science.|e Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.
authors.forename: Kieron
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Barclay
authors.affiliation: c Stockholm University.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kolk
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005260:Female; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009026:Mortality / Q000266:history*; D009099:Multiple Birth Offspring; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D012042:Registries; D012307:Risk Factors; D035781:Siblings; D013548:Sweden
keywords: mortality; quantity–quality trade-off; register-based research; resource dilution; sibship size