This project will examine the long term and intergenerational impact of policies in the 1970s and 1980s to reduce teen pregnancy. We analyze the effects of interventions that were designed to influence the likelihood of teen pregnancy. These interventions were adopted by various municipalities and affected women of different ages in different locations, creating a quasi-experiment.
Previous studies have produced convincing evidence that young women who have better control over family planning make different career and lifelong fertility choices. However, we know little about the potential long-term effects of these career and childbearing decisions on the children born to these women. Identifying the short- and the long-term effects of the social mechanisms at work - women's fertility and career decisions and the impact on their children - is at the core of the intellectual merit of the proposal.
This work uses individual-level registry data on the health, education, and labor market outcomes of three generations of Swedes to trace out the effect of these family planning policies on the short-, medium-, and long-term health and socio-economic outcomes of the affected women and their children. Swedish registry data link parents to children across generations, allowing the PIs to compare sisters, who were affected by the policies to those who were not, and their children.
Understanding the impact of health care policies on women's and children's health and social well-being is important for predicting the costs and benefits of a wide range of policies.
