The proposed study will use data on young women from the 1979-1990 panels of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the 1968-1990 panels of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to investigate the relationship between early childbearing, educational attainment, and employment behavior. The study will estimate a series of structural discrete-time dynamic econometric models of fertility, schooling, and labor force participation. The statistical methodology allows past and present realizations of fertility, schooling, and work effort to be endogenous determinants of one another. Thus, the specifications can analyze the effects of exogenous economic, sociological, and institutional factors on the timing of schooling, work, and fertility decisions and the effects of the timing of these decisions on subsequent events. The specifications will also permit an examination of whether early fertility and schooling and career disruptions have long-lasting effects on adults' economic well-being. The proposed analysis is based on a rational choice model which hypothesizes that-the relative economic and non-economic rewards associated with alternative fertility, schooling, and work outcomes influence teenagers' and young adults' decision-making. The model suggests why childbearing, schooling, and employment might each have direct negative effects on one another. In empirically applying the model, young women's decisions are assumed to be conditioned by sociological, physiological and institutional factors including family structure and background, neighborhood background, religiousness, race, physical maturity, local economic conditions, school quality, contraceptive costs, family planning clinic availability, and access to abortion services. Many of these contextual variables are available directly from the NLSY and PSID. Additional longitudinal state- and county-specific economic and institutional information (e.g., employment composition, per-pupil school funding, and family planning clinic and abortion access) will be collected separately and merged with the NLSY and PSID data. The model's predictions will be tested within the context of a structural econometric model. This structural methodology will permit detailed analysis of the economic hypotheses and will explicitly examine how teenagers' present-value expectations of the streams of economic benefits and consequences associated with alternative fertility, schooling, and employment decisions affect current decision-making. Simulations based on the structural estimates will be used to predict adolescent behavior and to examine the sensitivity of that behavior to a number of demographic and policy changes. Simulations will also be used to examine how changes in behavior, demographic characteristics and policy have contributed to intertemporal shifts in rates of adolescent childbearing.
| Matthews, S; Ribar, D; Wilhelm, M (1997) The effects of economic conditions and access to reproductive health services on state abortion rates and birthrates. Fam Plann Perspect 29:52-60 |
