The Causal Effect of Teen Motherhood on Worklessness

Teen motherhood continues to be high in the US and the UK relative to most other western European countries. While recent research has clarified how effective policies to reduce teen motherhood might be (Kearney (2009)), there remains little evidence that quantifies the causal effects of teen motherhood on such mothers and their first born children. This paper provides estimates of the causal effect of teen motherhood on worklessness and does so by exploiting the availability of two sources of exogenous variation in maternal age at first birth, which have not previously been used in this literature. Despite the strength of our instruments, we find no significant causal effects. Acknowledgements: We are grateful to participants of the 2009 WPEG annual meeting, and to Alex Bryson and Stephen Machin in particular, for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the authors. We thank the Office for National Statistics and the Economic and Social Data Service for making available the data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Corresponding author: Yu Zhu, School of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NP, UK. Email: [email protected], Phone: +44-1227 827438.