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Title: Teen Childbearing and Human Capital: Does Timing Matter?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Klepinger, Daniel H. Lundberg, Shelly Plotnick, Robert D. |
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Teen Childbearing and Human Capital: Does Timing Matter? Working Paper, Center for Public Health Research and Evaluation, Battelle Memorial, Seattle WA, October 1999 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Battelle Human Affairs Research Center Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at First Birth; Childbearing, Adolescent; Educational Attainment; Human Capital; Racial Differences; Schooling; Teenagers; Variables, Instrumental; Wages; Work Experience In this paper, we model and estimate the relationship between teenage childbearing at different ages and human capital investment. Taking advantage of a large set of potential instruments for fertility--principally state and county-level indicators of the costs of fertility and fertility control--we use instrumental variables procedures to generate unbiased estimates of the effects of early fertility at different ages on education and work. Using data from the NLSY, we find that teenage childbearing at any age substantially reduces years of formal education and early adult work experience for both black and white women. The effects of early and later teen births are similar for both education and early adult work experience. There are no important racial differences in the effects. In contrast, we find no significant impact of a first birth during ages 20-24 on education or work experience. An early teen birth fails have stronger detrimental effects because younger teen mothers are as likely to graduate from high school as older teen mothers, and are equally unlikely to attend college. Our results suggest that "a teen birth is a teen birth", and that public policies that reduce teenage childbearing are likely to have positive effects on the economic well being of many young mothers and their families. |
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Bibliography Citation
Klepinger, Daniel H., Shelly Lundberg and Robert D. Plotnick. "Teen Childbearing and Human Capital: Does Timing Matter?" Working Paper, Center for Public Health Research and Evaluation, Battelle Memorial, Seattle WA, October 1999. |