TY  - JOUR
AU  - Black,Sandra E.
AU  - Devereaux,Paul J.
AU  - Salvanes,Kjell
TI  - Fast Times at Ridgemont High? The Effect of Compulsory Schooling Laws on Teenage Births
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10911
PY  - 2004
Y2  - November 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10911
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10911.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Sandra Black
Department of Economics
University of Texas
Austin, TX  78712
Tel: 512-475-8519
E-Mail: sblack@austin.utexas.edu

Paul J. Devereux
School of Economics
and Geary Institute
University College Dublin
Belfield, Dublin 4
Ireland
E-Mail: devereux@ucd.ie

Kjell Salvanes
Department of Economics
Norwegian School of Economics
Hellev. 30, N-5035 Bergen
Norway
E-Mail: kjell.salvanes@nhh.no
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-06-01
AB  - Research suggests that teenage childbearing adversely affects both the outcomes of the mothers as well as those of their children. We know that low-educated women are more likely to have a teenage birth, but does this imply that policies that increase educational attainment reduce early fertility? This paper investigates whether increasing mandatory educational attainment through compulsory schooling legislation encourages women to delay childbearing. We use variation induced by changes in compulsory schooling laws in both the United States and Norway to estimate the effect in two very different institutional environments. We find evidence that increased compulsory schooling does in fact reduce the incidence of teenage childbearing in both the United States and Norway, and these results are quite robust to various specification checks. Somewhat surprisingly, we also find that the magnitude of these effects is quite similar in the two countries. These results suggest that legislation aimed at improving educational outcomes may have spillover effects onto the fertility decisions of teenagers.
ER  -