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Title: A Re-Evaluation of Teenage Childbearing
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Mullin, Charles H. |
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A Re-Evaluation of Teenage Childbearing Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1998. DAI-A 59/07, p. 2626, Jan 1999 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Childbearing, Adolescent; Fertility; Marriage; Maternal Employment; Sex Ratios First, I construct a model of marriage, labor-force participation, and childbearing in which women make different decisions depending on whether they foresee themselves marrying. Those that intend to marry choose to delay their childbearing and invest more resources in their children. Furthermore, women who bear children both in and out of wedlock invest more resources in their in-wedlock children. I test the marriage market implications of the model with data on women from the NLSY and sex ratios constructed from the 1990 Census. In general, I do not reject the implications of the model. Second, I exam the casual effect of early childbearing on women on their children. I use the natural experiment of miscarriages to control for the self-selection into early motherhood. Since not all miscarriages are random, I cannot point identify the effect with this instrument. However, I show under general conditions that this instrumental variable estimator provides upper bounds on the casual effects of not delaying childbearing, while the traditional OLS estimator provides lower bounds of these casual effects. Additionally, I apply results developed in Horowitz and Manski (1995) on identification with data from contaminated samples in conjunction with the miscarriage data to construct bounds on the effect of early childbearing. Both bounding techniques produce qualitatively similar results: The casual effect of not delaying childbearing for young women and their children is small, and the best inference, although not statistically significant, indicate that it is positive. These results are strongest for women under 18 years of age. In other words, forcing teenagers to delay there childbearing worsens their and their children's expected outcomes. |
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Bibliography Citation
Mullin, Charles H. A Re-Evaluation of Teenage Childbearing. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1998. DAI-A 59/07, p. 2626, Jan 1999. |