Abortion and Selection

Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Jonathan Gruber, Phillip Levine and Doug Staiger
Additional contact information
Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat: Departments of Public Policy and Economics, Duke University, and NBER
Jonathan Gruber: Department of Economics, MIT, and NBER

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009, vol. 91, issue 1, 124-136

Abstract: Abortion legalization in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility. Some research has suggested that it altered cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding selection mechanisms and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results indicate that lower-cost abortion brought about by legalization altered young adult outcomes through selection. In particular, it increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (78)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.91.1.124 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Abortion and Selection (2006)
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:tpr:restat:v:91:y:2009:i:1:p:124-136

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().