Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Paper Series,
Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research

No 1/2004: Estimating Long-Term Consequences of Teenage Childbearing - An Examination of the Siblings Approach

Helena Holmlund
Additional contact information
Helena Holmlund: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Postal: SOFI, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract: One of the remedies to selection bias in estimates of the labour market consequences of teenage motherhood has been to estimate within-family effects. A major critique, however, is that heterogeneity within the family might still bias the estimates. Using a large Swedish dataset on biological sisters, I revisit the question of the consequences of teenage motherhood. My contribution is that I am able to control for heterogeneity within the family; I use gradepoint-averages at age 16, a pre-motherhood characteristic that differs across sisters within the same family. My findings confirm the presumption that within-family heterogeneity can result in biased within-family estimates. Moreover, my results show that when controlling for school performance, the siblings approach and a traditional cross section yield similar coefficients.

Keywords: Fertility; sibling models

JEL-codes: J13

34 pages, March 19, 2004

Full text files

FULLTEXT01.pdf PDF-file 

Download statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Daniel Rossetti ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

This page generated on 2024-02-05 17:13:41.