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Title: Teenage Fertility and High School Completion
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Ribar, David C. |
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Teenage Fertility and High School Completion Review of Economics and Statistics 76,3 (August 1994): 413-424. Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2109967 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Harvard University Press Keyword(s): Adolescent Fertility; Age at Menarche/First Menstruation; Benefits; Childbearing; Educational Attainment; Endogeneity; Family Planning; High School Completion/Graduates; Modeling, Probit; Religious Influences; School Completion; Schooling; Teenagers Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper uses 1979-85 data on women from the NLSY to examine the economic and demographic antecedents of adolescent childbearing and high school completion. Teenage fertility and high school completion are modeled as dichotomous variables, and their determinants are estimated using a bivariate probit. Importantly, early fertility is modeled as an endogenous determinant of schooling. Previous studies which have attempted to control for the possible endogeneity of fertility have relied on questionable identifying restrictions. The identifying variables in this paper--age at menarche, state expenditures for family planning services and state contraceptive and abortion restrictions--represent a vast improvement over previous work in that they are theoretically and statistically related with early fertility but not directly associated with schooling. The paper finds that when proper identifying instruments are used teenage fertility appears to have little effect on high school completion. This result is robust to respecification of the dependent variables and respecification of the model generally. The result suggests that policy interventions aimed only at reducing early fertility such as freely distributing contraceptives or increasing the access to family planning clinics may not affect school completion. The paper does find that welfare generosity, family structure, parents' socioeconomic status, religiousness and race are significant determinants of both fertility and schooling. Thus, interventions directed at these underlying causes may be successful in reducing teen childbearing and increasing schooling. |
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Bibliography Citation
Ribar, David C. "Teenage Fertility and High School Completion." Review of Economics and Statistics 76,3 (August 1994): 413-424.
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