Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

Abstract

Newcomer, Arline Geronimus and participants in the Workshop on Low Income Populations at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for helpful comments on an earlier draft and Frances Margolin, Hoda Makar, and Simon Hotz for their editorial assistance. We especially wish to thank Robert Willis for numerous helpful discussions during the course of this study. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Fertility postponement and labor market outcomes

“…This is clearly unfeasible, and researchers have tried to identify factors that affect fertility timing but are not under a woman's control. Examples include biological fertility shocks, such as miscarriages and stillbirths (already used in the literature examining the effects of teenage pregnancies [2]), contraceptive failures, and infertility. Empirical findings from studies using quasiexperiments are stronger than those based on controlling for potential observed and unobserved differences between early and late mothers.…”

“…Some studies try to control for women's health status and risky health behaviors [1], [2], [4]. One study uses administrative hospital data to show that women who miscarried and those who did not had only small differences in hospitalization before their first childbirth [4].…”

The effects of motherhood timing on career path

“…This paper contributes an approach to identification using biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables for fertility timing in the career outcome equations. 7 The strategy is similar in spirit to Hotz et al (1999), who use miscarriage (spontaneous abortion) as a natural experiment to consider the impact of teenage motherhood. While they find no benefit from motherhood delay, their results need not extend to later delays, as older mothers face substantially different constraints in career and family; older mothers tend to have higher earnings potential and their motherhood timing conflicts are more likely to involve work than school.…”

“…States that adopted between 1972 and 1992 are, in chronological order of adoption: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, California, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon, Tennessee, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Vermont. 25 See Hotz et al (1999) for a thorough discussion of how abortion affects the validity of miscarriage as an instrumental variable for fertility timing. 26 The text of the first question reads: "Before you became pregnant the 1st time/between (date) and (date) did you ever use any methods to keep from getting pregnant?"…”

“…20 The sample is further limited to those who had their first birth between the ages of 20 and 33, and between the years 1983 and 2000, excluding teen mothers (studied in Hotz et al, 1999) and childless women. Several other restrictions are motivated by data limitations: earnings observations are available for all birth year cohorts for the age range from 21 to 34, and 19 Confidential Geocode data is used for state level identification to test for differences in the tradeoff by family leave regime.…”