Chart of the Day: The long-run outcomes of teenage mothers
Inspired by Emily Nix’s Twitter thread connecting her research to the current abortion discussion, today I’m highlighting a chart from my paper with Lisa Schulkind “The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later-Life Outcomes”. In the paper, we estimate long-term outcomes for young women who had a birth just before their expected high school graduation date versus just after.
I actually have two figures I want to show. The first shows the discontinuity in education for those that had their babies just before high school graduation versus just after. There’s a steady increase in high school graduation rates through months to graduation, but a discontinuity at the graduation date for further education. Being pregnant and having a baby makes the current level of education continuously harder, but not having the diploma makes reaching the next level of education at all out of reach for some.
This is the variation we’re using in the difference-in-differences estimates we use for the analysis of long-term outcomes, which we estimate by age at the date the outcome was measured (this is cross-sectional data from Decennial and ACS, not the longitudinal data I usually work with now).
Here’s the description of our findings from our abstract “We find that mothers who gave birth during the school year are 5.4 percentage points less likely to complete their high school education, are less likely to be married, and have more children than their counterparts who gave birth just a few months later. The wages for these two sets of teenage mothers are not statistically different, but with a lower likelihood of marriage and more children, the households of the treated mothers are more likely to fall below the poverty threshold.”
This is a sample of women who mostly gave birth after the Roe vs. Wade decision, so there is selection relative to the set of women who will be affected by a Roe vs. Wade appeal. It is unclear if the selection of our sample is positive (those who are most able to care for children at a young age choose to carry the child to term) or negative (those who are most marginalized are those that cannot get the abortion they would otherwise choose even when it is legal).
We have one figure that shows pre-Roe mothers versus post-Roe mothers using the 1980 Census sample, which is hidden in the appendix (as you would in a world where you thought Roe vs. Wade would remain the law of the land, so the comparison wasn’t of critical importance). There is no clearly discernable pattern between the two sets of young women, so it doesn’t help us much to understand the sample selection issue.