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Title: A Rational Choice Based Model of Teenage Childbearing
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Mullin, Charles H. |
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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. |
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Bibliography Citation
Mullin, Charles H. "A Rational Choice Based Model of Teenage Childbearing." Working Paper, Vanderbilt University, January 1999. |