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Title: Essays on Health and Family Economics
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Mak, Ho Ching
Essays on Health and Family Economics
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, 2018
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Childbearing, Adolescent

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

Chapter 3 studies teen childbearing and establishes its quantitative relationship with maturation of adolescents. Teen childbearing is a particular social concern because unlike most other risky behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, it is a lifelong responsibility that cannot be reversed. Nevertheless, this irreversibility also makes it difficult to identify whether the involved individuals regret their childbearing decision or not. The answer to this question matters to adolescent policies since only if teen childbearing leads to maturation and regret, the society is in a position to intervene the autonomy of adolescents. This chapter applies the methodology devised in Mak (2015) to measure maturation using the simultaneous changes in many reversible risky behaviors. We find that teen childbearing is associated with 18% more probability of being mature conditional on being immature in the previous period for females; the corresponding figure for males are much smaller in magnitude. Together with some other supporting evidence, this result indicates that teen childbearing is a very negative shock to the involved females, yet the involved males tend to leave the burden to their partners.
Bibliography Citation
Mak, Ho Ching. Essays on Health and Family Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, 2018.