A New Model for Family Resource Allocation Among Siblings: Competition, Forbearance, and Support

Abstract

Previous research analyzing within-family education resource allocation usually employs the sibship and birth order of a child as explanatory variables. We argue in this paper that to correctly characterize the resource competition and support scenario within a family, one should identify the Sex, Seniority, and most importantly Age Difference of a child’s sibling structure, and hence we call our analysis a SSAD model of family resource allocation. We show that siblings with different combinations of SSAD may play distinct roles in family resource allocation. Ignoring such facts may distort the significance and/or direction of the prediction. We support our analysis with empirical evidence using data from Taiwan.