Habit Persistence and Teen Sex: Could Increased Access to Contraception Have Unintended Consequences for Teen Pregnancies?

Peter Arcidiacono, Ahmed Khwaja and Lijing Ouyang

Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 2011, vol. 30, issue 2, 312-325

Abstract: We develop a dynamic discrete-choice model of teen sex and pregnancy that incorporates habit persistence. Habit persistence has two sources here. The first is a “fixed cost” of having sex, which relates to a moral or psychological barrier that has been crossed the first time one has sex. The second is a “transition cost,” whereby once a particular relationship has progressed to sex, it is difficult to move back. We estimate significant habit persistence in teen sex, implying that the long-run effects of contraception policy may be different from their short-run counterparts, especially if the failure rate of contraception is sufficiently large. Programs that increase access to contraception are found to decrease teen pregnancies in the short run but increase them in the long run.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07350015.2011.652052 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jnlbes:v:30:y:2011:i:2:p:312-325

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UBES20

DOI: 10.1080/07350015.2011.652052

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business & Economic Statistics is currently edited by Eric Sampson, Rong Chen and Shakeeb Khan

More articles in Journal of Business & Economic Statistics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().