Holmlund, Helena. 2005. “Estimating Long-Term Consequences of Teenage Childbearing: An Examination of the Siblings Approach.” Journal of Human Resources 40(3): 716-743.

Within-family estimates have been considered a remedy to selection bias in estimates of long-run consequences of teen motherhood. A major critique, however, is that heterogeneity within the family might still bias the estimates. Using Swedish data on biological sisters, I revisit the question of the consequences of teenage motherhood. My contribution lies in controlling for heterogeneity within the family by using premotherhood school performance, a characteristic that differs across sisters. My findings confirm the presumption that within-family heterogeneity can result in biased sibling estimates. Moreover, my results show that when controlling for school performance, the siblings approach and a traditional cross-section yield similar coefficients.

The author is a PhD candidate in economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University. The author thanks Anders Björklund, Mikael Lindahl, Jeffrey Smith, Marianne Sundström, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments. She also thanks seminar participants at the workshop in Family Decisions and Family Policy, Aarhus School of Business, Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Trade Union Institute for Economic Research (FIEF), the ESPE-meetings in Bergen 2004 and Princeton University Graduate Labor Lunch. Financial support from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research is gratefully acknowledged. The data collection for this research also was supported by NOS-S, SCHOLAR, CEPS and the Spencer Foundation. The data used in this article are proprietary and derived from Swedish population and education registers. The author will provide information regarding obtaining the data from Statistics Sweden. Contact the author: Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, SWEDEN. E-mail: Helena.Holmlund@sofi.su.se.