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Author: Mullin, Charles H.

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1.	Mullin, Charles H.
1.	A Rational Choice Based Model of Teenage Childbearing Working Paper, Vanderbilt University, January 1999. Also: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/mullin/research/cq_theory/child_quality_theory.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Bargaining Model; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Child Health; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Marital Status; Maternal Employment; Mothers, Adolescent; Mothers, Income; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Poverty; Welfare Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. I construct a model of marriage, labor-force participation, and childbearing in which women's decisions depend on whether they foresee themselves marrying. Those who intend to marry have an increased incentive to delay their childbearing and to invest more resources in their children born in wedlock. Furthermore, the model has three novel implications concerning child wellbeing. First, a fall in the returns to marriage, regardless of the cause, has deleterious effects on children. Second, an increase in the bargaining power of women with respect to marriage can lead to a decrease in average child quality. Third, as women's marital prospects increase, the average quality of children born out of wedlock will decrease. This model produces testable implications of women's behavior as a function of their marital prospects. I test these implications with data on women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths (NLSY) and the 1940 through 1990 US censuses. In general, I am unable to reject the implications of the model. Although the power of some of these tests is low, others do provide statistically significant support of the model. However, I am unable to rule out some alternative explanations of the data.
	Bibliography Citation Mullin, Charles H. "A Rational Choice Based Model of Teenage Childbearing." Working Paper, Vanderbilt University, January 1999.

2.	Mullin, Charles H.
2.	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.
	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.

3.	Mullin, Charles H.
3.	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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