Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

Background: The United States has the highest rate of teenage childbearing among industrialized countries, even though this rate has been declining in the last decade.

There is no consensus in the economic literature as to the magnitude of the negative effects of teenage childbearing, if any, and the direction of causality. The purpose of this research is to analyze the effect of teenage childbearing on the mother's employment and earnings in Georgia.

Study Design: We use two samples combined from three administrative datasets of the state of Georgia for the years 1990 to 2005. We used a birth subset of Vital Statistics, an employment and wage datasets compiled from the unemployment insurance files and a welfare dataset compiled from the application for public cash assistance files. Sample one is composed of 171 sister pairs or trio identified from families included in the public cash assistance file who also had birth records, one of whom is a mother who gave birth before age 18 while the other is a mother whose first birth was at age 18 or later. The analysis of this sample is a family fixed effects model. The second sample is composed of 42,222 young mothers identified from birth records (without a link to cash assistance) who were pregnant as teens and whose first pregnancy ended with either a birth prior to age 18 or a live birth at ages 18 or 19 who were recorded as having a prior fetal death. Assuming that fetal deaths were exogenous, this analysis suggests the causal effect of having a live birth prior to age 18. For both samples, we use panel data analysis to compare the outcomes for the 4 to 10 years following the 18th birthday of teen mothers and their counterparts. The employment and wage files offer quarterly data so that the sample sizes increase considerably. Heckman selectivity correction was used in the wage equations for both samples.

Main findings: Overall, there was no significant difference in any of the labor market outcomes studied in the sister sample analysis. In the fetal death sample, however, differential results were found depending on the race of the mothers. Among Blacks, teen mothers were less likely to be employed than those who had experienced a fetal death, and those who worked earned less. In contrast, among Whites, teen mothers were more likely to work and, conditional on work, to earn more than the fetal death group.

Conclusions: The differential results might be due to sample composition and the background. The absence of statistically significant results in the sister sample and the small magnitude of the teen coefficients in the fetal death sample suggest that teen pregnancy alone does not have a large influence on mothers' employment and earnings as adults.