Hotz, V. Joseph, Susan Williams McElroy, and Seth G. Sanders. 2005. “Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment.” Journal of Human Resources 40(3): 683-715.

We exploit a “natural experiment” associated with human reproduction to identify the causal effect of teen childbearing on the socioeconomic attainment of teen mothers. We exploit the fact that some women who become pregnant experience a miscarriage and do not have a live birth. Using miscarriages an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of teen mothers not delaying their childbearing on their subsequent attainment. We find that many of the negative consequences of teenage childbearing are much smaller than those found in previous studies. For most outcomes, the adverse consequences of early childbearing are short-lived. Finally, for annual hours of work and earnings, we find that a teen mother would have lower levels of each at older ages if they had delayed their childbearing.

V. Joseph Hotz is a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Susan Williams McElroy is an associate professor of economics and education policy at the University of Texas at Dallas. Seth G. Sanders is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. This research was supported, in part, by NICHD Grant No. R01 HD-31590. The authors wish to thank Sarah Gordon, Stuart Hagen, Terra McKinnish, Charles Mullin, Carl Schneider, and Daniel Waldram for able and conscientious research assistance on this project. They wish to thank Robert Moffitt, Frank Furstenberg, Arleen Leibowitz, John Strauss, Susan Newcomer, Arline Geronimus and participants of the Institute for Research on Poverty Workshop on Low Income Populations for helpful comments on an earlier draft. They also thank Frances Margolin, Hoda Makar, Simon Hotz, Leonard Stewart, Jr., and Kruti Dholakia for editorial assistance. The authors are grateful to Saul Hoffman for bringing to our attention a set of systematic errors in the deflating of the monetary variables used in our analyses to real terms in a previous draft. All of these errors have been corrected. The authors especially wish to thank Robert Willis for numerous helpful discussions during the course of this study. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.