Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/96716 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 8072
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
education
teen pregnancy
adolescent motherhood
youth
high school
Chile
JEL: 
O15
J13
I25
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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