Author(s)

Meiling Guo

Corresponding Author

Meiling Guo

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the impact of family size and siblings on the academic performance of 19487 Chinese middle school students. The researcher believes that the siblings’ effect is nonnegligible in children’s intellectual development. Thus, on the one hand, the number and sex of siblings are included when measuring the family size effect. On the other hand, the sibling composition effect will be tested under each family size. The findings indicate that academic performance is first positive but later negative correlated with family size, and the optimal family size is 2. In addition, siblings can benefit children’s academic learning in general, but having younger sisters makes a boy get a relatively poor test score.

Keywords

Family size, sibling composition, educational economics