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Author: Staiger, Douglas
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Staiger, Douglas
Wilwerding, Jonathan
An Economic Model of Teen Motherhood: Opportunity Costs, Biological Constraints and the Timing of First Birth
Working Paper April 2001, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Revised, April 2002.
Also: http://economics.uchicago.edu/download/staiger.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Department of Economics, University of Chicago
Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at First Birth; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Childbearing, Premarital/Nonmarital; Self-Reporting

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

This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to evaluate an economic model of the timing of first birth. We estimate a Tobit-type model, in which a woman chooses her age of first birth based on economic factors subject to the biological constraint that the birth must occur after physical maturity. This model fits the empirical distribution of first birth across a wide range of women. Biological constraints are important, with late maturity associated with low birth rates by age 17 and high birth rates in the later teen years. School achievement, as measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), accounts for all of the racial differences in timing of first birth and predicts a 10-fold difference in teen-motherhood between top and bottom deciles of achievement. Finally, we find that the model is consistent with self-reports about expected age of first birth and whether a pregnancy was wanted.

In this paper, we use data on births between the ages of 14 and 37 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to directly investigate the role of economic and other factors in determining the timing of first births. We develop, estimate and evaluate a reduced form economic model in which a woman chooses a target age for first birth based on economic factors (such as benefits of having a child, and opportunity costs in terms of foregone labor market opportunities), and then gives birth at that age subject to biological constraints (e.g., physical maturity). This simple structure implies that the age of first birth can be estimated with a Tobit-type model (with random and unobserved truncation), where both the target age and the truncation point depend on observable variables and unobserved error terms. In our estimation, we allow unobserved heterogeneity in the error terms using a discrete factor approximation (Heckman and Singer, 1984; Goldman, Leibowitz and Buchanan, 1998; Mroz, 1999).

Bibliography Citation
Staiger, Douglas and Jonathan Wilwerding. "An Economic Model of Teen Motherhood: Opportunity Costs, Biological Constraints and the Timing of First Birth." Working Paper April 2001, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Revised, April 2002.