During the late 1990s, several states eliminated affirmative action admissions policies at their public colleges. Some of these states substituted a program that grants admission to the top x% of each high school's graduating class. These new programs were instituted in efforts to restore minority college enrollments to their prior levels. This paper finds that the preferences given to minority applicants under affirmative action are large and that the minority share of admitted students in top-tier institutions would fall substantially after eliminating these preferences. However, there are not sufficient numbers of minorities in the top x% of their high school for the expected recovery from an x% program to be very large. Furthermore, most minority beneficiaries would have been accepted without these programs. As a result, x% programs are unable to replace traditional affirmative action and maintain the share of minority students.

This paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility, which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children. It shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order. The important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous, a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored. The implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders (that is, who are born later) have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders, and that parents who are inequality-averse will not have more than one child. The model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results. The effects of a child's birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal data set from the Philippines that covers a very long period. We examine the effects of birth order on both number of hours in school during education and completed education. The results for both are consistent with the predictions of the model.