Abortion Legalization and Adolescent Substance Use

Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens

No 9193, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We assess whether in utero exposure to legalized abortion in the early 1970's affected individuals' propensities to use controlled substances as adolescents. We exploit the fact that some states legalized abortion before national legalization in 1973 to compare differences in substance use for adolescents across birth cohorts in different states. We find that persons exposed to early legalization were, on average, much less likely to use controlled substances. We also assess how substance use varies with state level birth rates and abortion ratios. Overall, our results suggest that legalization lowered substance use because of the selective use of abortion by relatively disadvantaged women.

JEL-codes: I12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-09
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Charles, Kerwin Kofi and Melvin Stephens Jr. “Abortion Legalization and Adolescent Substance." Journal of Law and Economics 49, 2 (October 2006): 481-505.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9193.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Abortion Legalization and Adolescent Substance Use (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:nbr:nberwo:9193

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9193

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().