Sibling correlations are used as overall measures of the impact of family background and community influences on individual outcomes. While most correlation studies show that siblings are quite similar in terms of future achievement, we lack specific knowledge of what it is about family...

Using data on 19,000 whole siblings, it is shown that earnings vary significantly among students who have graduated from different colleges. The cross-section estimates are up to twice the within-family estimates, indicating that a regression estimator of college effects that does not adjust...

This paper studies the causal effect of birth spacing (i.e., the age difference between siblings) on personality traits. We use longitudinal data from a large British cohort which has been followed from birth until age 42. Following earlier studies, we employ miscarriages between the first and...

This paper studies whether sibling gender affects personality traits. We use the idea that if parents decide to have a second child, it is random whether they will have a boy or a girl. Therefore, the relationship between the second-born sibling's gender and the first sibling's personality...

Recent empirical work questions the negative relationship between family size and children’s attainments proposed by theoretical work and supported by a large empirical literature. We use twin births as an exogenous source of variation in family size in an unusually rich dataset where it is...