New Evidence on the Link Between Housing Environment and Children`s Educational Attainments

Abstract

There is an extensive literature that posits the hypothesis that a better housing environment enhances a child’s educational attainments. However, there is little causal evidence demonstrating the presence of this effect. Using the census files covering the entire population of Taiwan, we examine the effect of housing environment on children’s educational attainments. Because the Taiwan census data contain unique address information for every household, we are able to control for unobserved family heterogeneity by comparing a child with his or her peers of the same age cohort in the same neighborhood. After controlling for neighborhood using tens of thousands of area dummies, the chance of high school enrollment for teens (ages 16 and 17) and college enrollment for young adults (ages 19 and 20) is found to be positively correlated with increases in floor space, increases in residential stability, and ownership status, but negatively correlated with increases in building age. In addition, we found that the effect of a child’s private space on the chance of school enrollment is nonlinear and different across age and gender. The results are robust even when we account for the potential endogeneity between sibship size and educational outcome using the instrumental variable method.