Alcohol use and pregnancies among youth: Evidence from a semi-parametric approach

Inna Cintina ()

No 2011-7, Working Papers from University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Abstract: Despite a well-established correlation between alcohol intake and various risk-taking sexual behaviors, the causality remains unknown. I model the effect of alcohol use on the likelihood of pregnancy among youth using a variety of estimation techniques. The preference is given to the semi-parametric model where the cumulative distribution of heterogeneity is approximated by a 4-point discrete distribution. Using data on 17-28 year-old women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that alcohol consumption increases the likelihood of pregnancy by 4.7 percentage points. Quantitatively similar but statistically weaker effects were found in the fully parametric models such as the two-stage least squares model and the bivariate probit model. Finally, the fully parametric models that ignore the effect of unobserved heterogeneity failed to establish this relationship.

Keywords: alcohol; minimum legal drinking age; teenage pregnancy; discrete-time hazard model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011-09
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