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Title: The Socioeconomic Costs of Teenage Childbearing: Evidence and Interpretation
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Geronimus, Arline T. Korenman, Sanders D. |
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The Socioeconomic Costs of Teenage Childbearing: Evidence and Interpretation Demography 30,2 (May 1993): 281-290. Also: http://www.springerlink.com/content/d1gr58p1v2u91374/ Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Family Background and Culture; Fertility; First Birth; Heterogeneity; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Pregnancy, Adolescent; Siblings Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Until recently, the belief that teenage childbearing makes a substantial causal contribution to persistent socioeconomic disadvantage was pervasive. The scientific evidence used to support this interpretation was open to the criticism by failure to account for unobserved heterogeneity; fertility timing varies across populations, and early fertility is much more common in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Investigators therefore made efforts to control for background differences among mothers who had first births at different ages. We were concerned, however, that measures of family background used in these studies might have been inadequate. We undertook a sibling approach as a matched comparison group study in which the set of match characteristics is more complete than that provided by matching measured or observable family background characteristics. The recent replication of our study by Hoffman, Foster, and Furstenberg (1993) supports our principal conclusions that standard cross-sectional estimates of the consequences of teen childbearing are biased by failure to control adequately for family background differences between women who have first births as teenagers and those who have first births at later ages, and that previous estimates are likely to have exaggerated the costs of teen childbearing. |
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Bibliography Citation
Geronimus, Arline T. and Sanders D. Korenman. "The Socioeconomic Costs of Teenage Childbearing: Evidence and Interpretation." Demography 30,2 (May 1993): 281-290.
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