The Impact of Adolescent Motherhood on Education in Chile

Matias Berthelon and Diana Kruger ()
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Diana Kruger: Universidad Adolfo Ibañez

No 8072, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We analyze the effect of having a child in adolescence on high school completion, educational attainment, and college enrollment in a developing country setting using nine repeated rounds of Chilean household surveys that span the 1990–2009 period. We control for selection bias and household unobservables of teen motherhood with two approaches: different estimation methods – propensity score matching and family fixed effects for a large sub-sample of sisters – and three different samples. Results reveal that adolescent motherhood reduces the probability of high school completion by between 18 to 37 percent. Furthermore, effects are heterogeneous across education groups: teen motherhood has larger negative effects on high school completion and years of schooling among poor and low-education households. Our results imply that policies aimed at reducing early childbearing will have important short-term effects on young women's education outcomes.

Keywords: adolescent motherhood; teen pregnancy; education; youth; high school; Chile (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 J13 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-ger, nep-lam and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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