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Conditional cash transfers (CCT) have been adopted in many countries over the last two decades. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. In particular, relatively little is known about the effects of these programs on intra-household allocation decisions. This chapter uses evidence from a program in Cambodia, where eligibility varied substantially among siblings in the same household, to illustrate these effects. A simple model of schooling decisions highlights three different effects of a child-specific CCT: an income effect, a substitution effect, and a displacement effect. The model predicts that such a CCT should unambiguously increase enrollment for eligible children, but have an ambiguous effect on ineligible siblings. The ambiguity arises from the interaction of a positive income effect with a negative displacement effect. These predictions are shown to be consistent with evidence from Cambodia, where the CESSP Scholarship Program (CSP) makes modest transfers, conditional on school enrollment for children of middle-school age. Scholarship recipients were more than 20 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school, and 10 percentage points less likely to work for pay. However, the school enrollment and work of ineligible siblings was largely unaffected by the program. A possible fourth effect, operating through non-pecuniary spillovers of the intervention among siblings, remains largely outside the scope of the analysis, although there is some tentative evidence to suggest that it might also be at work.

This article highlights some of Dronkers and Hox's significant findings about family background and sibling effects on divorce. It proposes that in addition to siblings’ common family background and genetic heritage, their interaction over the life course may influence their attitudes toward marriage and divorce. The influence of sibling modeling and interaction over the life course may vary, depending on the gender and birth order of siblings.

Previous research provides evidence of a negative effect of body mass on women's economic outcomes. We extend this research by using a much older sample of individuals from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and by using a body mass measure that is lagged by 15 years instead of the traditional 7 years. One of the main contributions of this paper is a replication of previous research findings given our differing samples and measures. We compare OLS estimates with sibling fixed effects estimates and find that obesity is associated with an 18% reduction in women's wages, a 25% reduction in women's family income, and a 16% reduction in women's probability of marriage. These effects are robust – they persist much longer than previously understood and they persist across the life course, affecting older women as well as younger women.

Twelve percent of families in the United States have a child with a disability, yet little is known about the long-term consequences of growing up with a disabled sibling. This study builds on previous research regarding disability effects on families and offers an additional view on the linked lives of families and, in particular, siblings. Using secondary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, this study examines the odds of college completion among young adults with a disabled sibling during childhood. Specifically, I examine the gender differences among those who had a sibling with a disability. Women are more than 35% less likely to complete college if they had a disabled sibling during childhood; there is no significant difference by sibling disability status for boys. To understand whether children in low-resourced families are particularly penalized by having a disabled sibling, I examine whether various family resources attenuate the low graduation odds among those who had a disabled sibling. I find that having stably married parents during childhood largely eliminates the college completion gap between those with and without a disabled sibling. However, increases in mothers' education or family income do not attenuate the college completion gap. By identifying this gender disadvantage in college completion, this study shows that disabilities have consequences not just for disabled individuals but for their siblings as well, shining a light on a hidden cost of disability on families.

Using data from the British National Childhood Development Study, this paper examines the quality–quantity trade-off in fertility in multiple measures of child achievement. The results exhibit three characteristics: (1) Family-size effects appear very early in child development – as early as age two; (2) the effects are found in a broad array of achievement measures: labor market, cognitive, physical, and social; and (3) by age 16, the effects of family size stop growing (and what little evidence there is of change after that is not consistently in one direction). The paper argues that these results are inconsistent with preference-based explanations of the trade-off and point to some family-resource constraint. However, the relevant constraint appears more likely to be temporal than financial.

This study examines the extent to which educational outcomes are transmitted from mothers to daughters in rural China. An analysis of the 2010 China Family Panel Survey reveals that: (i) how far daughters go in their education is strongly associated with their mothers’ education; (ii) the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational outcomes in rural China was found to be stronger than the corresponding relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons, especially at higher levels of education; and (iii) while having more brothers and being born later worsens daughters’ educational outcomes, mothers’ higher education effectively mitigates these negative effects. These findings add to a growing body of literature and empirical evidence that challenges conventional social mobility research paradigms that neglect mothers’ roles. More importantly, the distinction between mother–daughter relationship and that between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons highlights the fact that education is likely transmitted intergenerationally via mechanisms that differ depending on the gendered parent–child pairs.

Thailand’s modernization and shift to a wage labor economy has led to increases in children’s educational attainment. This research, in two rural northern Thai villages, explores globalizing labor markets, traditional familial roles, and parental bias of educational investment by children’s gender and birth position, using a human behavioral ecology (HBE) framework. Survival models suggest that northern Thailand’s matrilineal tendencies may be increasing, not decreasing, with globalization: daughters bearing long-term expectations of support and remittance are more heavily invested in than sons, from whom matrilines expect and receive less. Birth position strongly affects educational attainment, reflecting differential familial helper and provider roles.

As immigrants live, learn, and earn in the US, the earnings of comparably educated immigrants converge regardless of their country or admission status. Indeed, controlling for initial human capital levels, there is an inverse relationship between immigrant entry earnings and earnings growth. Immigrants initially lacking transferable skills have lower initial earnings but a higher propensity to invest in human capital than natives or high-skill-transferability immigrants. Policies that bring in immigrants lacking immediately transferable skills, such as family-based admission policies, may provide an infusion of undervalued flexible human capital that facilitates innovation and entrepreneurship. Low-skill-transferability immigration may foster the development of immigrant employment that is distinct from native-born employment and possibly reduce employment competition with natives. Those who enter without immediately transferable skills are more likely to be permanent and permanence confers a variety of societal benefits. Because human capital that is not valued in the host-country's labor market is still useful for learning new skills, immigrants who initially lack transferable skills provide the host country an undervalued, highly malleable resource that may promote a vibrant economy in the long run.

Social mobility research starts conventionally from the children's generation and looks at group-specific individual life chances. However, an immediate interpretation of these results as measures of social reproduction is often misleading. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of a related but alternative approach which looks at intergenerational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation. It asks about the consequences of social inequality in this generation for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the parental origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children's relative chances of attaining particular social positions. As an empirical example, the paper describes patterns of educational reproduction in (West) Germany during the mid- and late 20th century. Simulations allow assessing the relative importance of various partial processes of social reproduction. A large proportion of the observed levels of educational reproduction can be attributed to family-related processes such as union formation. Drawing together analyses from various areas, the paper combines questions of social mobility research with a demographic perspective and broadens the analytical basis of inequality research for systematic comparative research.

This study examines the effects of a family's and individual children's characteristics on the probability of having a divorce. Current research shows a clear indication of increased divorce risks if an individual's parents or siblings have experienced a divorce. Explanations include both shared family characteristics (including genetic effects) and common characteristics of the individual children involved. This study analyzes the effects of shared family background characteristics on the divorce risk of individuals. By analyzing siblings within families and including individual children's characteristics in the analysis, it is possible to separate individual-level and family-level effects.

In addition to employing a multi-level structure of individual siblings nested within families, the data cited here are censored. For all individuals, the length of the marriage and the divorce status are known, but the divorce status is interpreted differently for individuals who have or have not experienced divorce. For divorced individuals, the final divorce status is known; for individuals who have not experienced divorce, the final marriage status is unknown or censored. The proper analysis model for such data is event history (also called survival) analysis. This study therefore employs a multi-level event history model.

Our results show that there is a similarity in the divorce risks of siblings from the same family, which is not explained away by the available child and family characteristics. This finding suggests that shared genetic and social heritage play an important role in the intergenerational transmission of divorce risks.