TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kearney,Melissa S.
AU  - Levine,Phillip B.
TI  - Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Early Childbearing
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13436
PY  - 2007
Y2  - September 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13436
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13436.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Melissa Schettini Kearney
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
3105  Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301/405-6202
E-Mail: kearney@econ.umd.edu

Phillip B. Levine
Department of Economics
Wellesley College
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481
Tel: 781/283-2162
Fax: 781/283-2177
E-Mail: plevine@wellesley.edu
M1  - published as Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine. "Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Early Childbearing," in Jonathan Gruber, editor, "The Problems of Disadvantaged Youth: An Economic Perspective" University of Chicago Press (2009)

M3  - presented at "Conference on Disadvantaged Youth", April 13-14, 2007
AB  - We examine the empirical relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and rates of early childbearing.  First, we use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to confirm a strong correlation at the individual level - women who grow up "disadvantaged" are much more likely to give birth as teens. Then we aggregate Vital Statistics microdata from 1968 through 2003 to conduct a cohort-based analysis of the relationship between rates of socioeconomic disadvantage of a birth cohort and the cohort's subsequent early childbearing experiences.  Our cohort level analysis implies an even tighter intergenerational correlation between rates of background disadvantage and early childbearing. But, when our analysis econometrically controls for fixed state and year of birth effects in the model to account for cultural and other differences across cohorts, the relationship between rates of disadvantage and early childbearing is found to be quite modest. For example, the elasticity of early childbearing rates by age 18 with respect to the probability of being born to a mother under age 18 is only 0.05.  This suggests that broader, societal forces are far more important in determining rates of early childbearing than rates of socioeconomic disadvantage per se.
ER  -