Understanding the effects of early motherhood in Britain: The effects on mothers

Arbeitspapier

This paper examines the socio-economic consequences of teenage motherhood for a cohort of British women born in 1970. We apply a number of different methodologies on the same dataset, including OLS, a propensity score matching estimator, and an instrumental variables estimator, using miscarriages as an instrument. We bound the biases introduced through IV due to non-randomness, and misreporting of the instrument. Our results are sensitive to the methodologies used. Taking only observed characteristics into account, the effects of teenage motherhood appear large and negative. The pathways are through bigger family size, and negative labour market outcomes for the mother and her partner, and are mitigated by transfers from the state through the British benefit system. Our IV estimates show that almost all these effects are reduced to zero once unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account. However our IV bounds show that biases introduced by non-randomness and misreporting of our instrument could be responsible for all of this apparent reduction in effects.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IFS Working Papers ; No. 04/20

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
• Thema: teenage pregnancy ; miscarriage ; instrumental variables ; Mütter ; Jugendliche ; Haushaltseinkommen ; Schätzung ; Großbritannien

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Goodman, Alissa ; Kaplan, Greg ; Walker, Ian
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)
• (wo): London
• (wann): 2004

Weitere Informationen

• DOI: doi:10.1920/wp.ifs.2004.0420
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/71559
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ