Volume 36, Number 4 (Fall) 2001
Dee, Thomas S.. 2001. "The Effects of Minimum Legal Drinking Ages on Teen Childbearing." Journal of Human Resources 36(4):823-838.
This study provides empirical evidence on the structural relationship between alcohol use and teen childbearing by exploiting the exogenous variation in youth alcohol availability generated by changes in state minimum legal drinking ages. The reduced-form childbearing models are based on state-level panel data and two-way fixed effect specifications as well as models that incorporate as controls the contemporaneous childbearing data from older women who were unaffected by the state changes in youth alcohol policy. The results indicate that alcohol availability and use have large, independent, and statistically significant effects on childbearing among black teens but not necessarily among white teens.
Thomas S. Dee is a professor of economics at Swarthmore College and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He would like to thank William Evans, David Ribar, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual caveats apply. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2002 through April 2005 from the author, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, tdee1@swarthmore.edu .
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X