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Title: Bounding Causal Effects With Contaminated and Censored Data: Reassessing the Impact of Early Childbearing on Children

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1.	Mullin, Charles H.
1.	Bounding Causal Effects With Contaminated and Censored Data: Reassessing the Impact of Early Childbearing on Children Working Paper # 00-W39, Vanderbilt University, September 2000. Also: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Econ/monstaweaver/workpaper/vu00-w39.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Birthweight; Home Environment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Empirical researchers commonly use instrumental variable (IV) assumptions to identify treatment effects. However, the credibility of these assumptions are often questionable. In this paper, we consider what can be learned when the assumptions necessary for point identification are violated in two specific ways. First, we allow the data to be contaminated, meaning that the exclusion restrictions of the IV estimator hold for only a fraction of the sample. Second, we allow for the data to be censored. After relaxing these assumptions point identification is no longer feasible, but we are able to construct sharp bounds of the treatment effect. In particular, we show that miscarriages can be seen as generating a contaminated and censored sample with which to analyze the impact of a mother's age at conception on the subsequent development of her child. Utilizing the aforementioned bounds, we are able to demonstrate that for non-black children, a delay in their mother;s age at first birth is detrimental to their well being. We use for our analysis the 978 women in the NLSY who reported a pregnancy before their 18th birthday. Of those pregnancies, 723 resulted in births, 185 terminated in abortions and 70 ended in miscarriages. After adjusting for population weights, these numbers imply that 73 percent of non-miscarried pregnancies are brought to term in our sample....We use the following assessments of children: birth weight, the Peabody Individual Achievement Tests (PIATs), the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), the behavioral problem indices (BPI), and measures of the child's home environment. The first four of these categories are child outcomes, while the last, home environment, provides indices of inputs into the child. All outcomes except birth weight are measured in percentile scores, normalized such that a higher score is better and, where appropriate, scores have been adjusted for cohort and age at the time of measurement.
	Bibliography Citation Mullin, Charles H. "Bounding Causal Effects With Contaminated and Censored Data: Reassessing the Impact of Early Childbearing on Children." Working Paper # 00-W39, Vanderbilt University, September 2000.

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