The Timing of Teenage Births and the Economic Returns to Education

Lisa Schulkind

No 1304, Working Papers from Trinity College, Department of Economics

Abstract: Teenage mothers tend to have poor economic outcomes later in life. However, the girls who become teenage mothers come from less advantaged backgrounds than those who delay childbearing until later in life, making causality difficult to establish. This paper examines the effect of having a child during high school versus becoming a young mother, but one who has already finished high school. I compare the outcomes of girls who have a child in the end of their senior year of high school to a control group comprised of girls who give birth a few months later. I find that girls who give birth during the school year are 9 percentage points less likely to graduate from high school; however, this has little effect on their eventual labor market outcomes. Despite being much more likely to obtain a High School degree, the control group does not enjoy higher earnings later in life, and is not any more likely to be working.

Keywords: Teenage Childbearing; Signaling Value; High School Degree (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-edu
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http://www3.trincoll.edu/repec/WorkingPapers2013/WP13-04.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tri:wpaper:1304

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