The Impact of Legalized Abortion on High School Graduation Through Selection and Composition

Stephan Whitaker

No 815, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: This paper tests the theory that legalized abortion reduces births of disadvantaged children, and thereby improves educational outcomes. The analysis reveals a positive selection effect for Black males, and a negative but insignificant selection effect among Whites and Hispanics. Abortion appears to have a significant negative impact on high school graduation overall, but this disappears when ethnicity is taken into account. The composition of cohorts born in the late 1960s and 1970s became progressively less White. This shifted weight to minorities with persistently lower graduation rates, thereby overwhelming any positive selection. The contribution of abortion to the continuous trend toward higher minority shares is brought to light by this study and will require further investigation. The primary data sets are from Census 2000 and the Allen Guttmacher Institute. Data from the American Council on Education is used to account for the people who earned graduate equivalency degrees, rather than high school diplomas. Overall, the relationship between abortion exposure and young people’s educational attainment appears to be small in magnitude, making abortion a weak education policy tool. A standard deviation increase or decrease in abortion might move the national high school graduation rate by less than two tenths of a percentage point.

Keywords: abortion; ethnicity; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12
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