Cluster-Seminar Public Finances and Living Conditions

Siblings are the ultimate peers, deeply shaping one another’s development. Do these influences vary with a family’s cultural background? I estimate how sibling spillovers differ for girls and boys with older brothers or sisters in migrant and native families, using a regression discontinuity design on high-quality administrative data. Exploiting exogenous variation in older siblings’ achievement from their school entry age, I show that girls in migrant families with high-achieving older brothers experience significantly lower educational outcomes. This effect does not appear for native girls or for migrant and native boys. I propose a simple theoretical framework to explain these results, highlighting gender bias in parental preferences as a key factor. Moreover, the effects are more pronounced in migrant families with traditional backgrounds and are also reflected in mothers' labor supply decisions when sons, rather than daughters, enter school late.