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Title: The Effect of First Interbirth Interval on Women’s Poverty at Midlife
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Stevenson, Amanda
The Effect of First Interbirth Interval on Women’s Poverty at Midlife
Presented: New Orleans LA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2013
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Births, Repeat / Spacing; Childbearing; First Birth; Marital Status; Modeling, Instrumental Variables; Poverty; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The relationship between childbearing and socioeconomic status is complicated by multiple sources of endogeneity. Cross sectional and logintudinal designs cannot account for selection into childbearing patterns and thus cannot assess causal relationships between fertility and later life outcomes. Focusing on the timing of childbearing and union status through early and mid-adulthood, I use miscarriage to construct an instrument for delivery and build a counterfactual condition for having a short temporal space between births. Using this approach with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate the effect on midlife poverty of having first and second births within 24 months of each other. My results indicate that these short interbirth intervals are causally related to increased midlife poverty. Extension of the work to illustrate the role of union status (continuous marriage since first birth versus all other union status histories) and midlife health as pathways is underway.
Bibliography Citation
Stevenson, Amanda. "The Effect of First Interbirth Interval on Women’s Poverty at Midlife." Presented: New Orleans LA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2013.