TY - JOUR
T1 - The unintended
T2 - negative outcomes over the life cycle
AU - Lin, Wanchuan
AU - Pantano, Juan
N1 - Funding Information:
Liz Ananat, Martha Bailey, Janet Currie, Sebastian Galiani, Bart Hamilton, Joe Hotz, Melissa Kearney, Pedro Mira, Enrico Moretti, Bob Pollak, Phil Robins and Matt Wiswall provided valuable comments. So did participants at several conferences and workshops. We are grateful to Naijia Guo, Hongqiao Li, Xiaoyu Xia, Cui Can, Yaoyao Zhu, Shuqiao Sun, Michael Jiang, Cecilia Fu, Yi Zhong and Dan Zhou for their help at various stages of this project. Lin gratefully acknowledges support from the Humanities and Social Science Foundation from China Ministry of Education (Project no. 13YJA790064). All errors remain our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
PY - 2015/4
Y1 - 2015/4
N2 - We quantify the impact of abortion legalization on the incidence of unintended births. While underlying much of the literature on abortion legalization, this effect had only been approximated by previous work. We find a strong decline in the prevalence of unintended births. Moreover, we find that this decline is mainly driven by “pro-choice” women. We then propose an empirical strategy to recover the effect of being “unintended” on life cycle outcomes. We use the differential timing of abortion legalization across states interacted with the mother’s religion (which facilitates or hinders legal abortion take up) to instrument for endogenous pregnancy intention. We find that being unintended causes negative outcomes (higher crime, lower schooling, lower earnings) over the life cycle. Our paper provides an initial step towards quantifying this key mechanism behind many of the well-documented long-term effects associated with changes in reproductive health policy.
AB - We quantify the impact of abortion legalization on the incidence of unintended births. While underlying much of the literature on abortion legalization, this effect had only been approximated by previous work. We find a strong decline in the prevalence of unintended births. Moreover, we find that this decline is mainly driven by “pro-choice” women. We then propose an empirical strategy to recover the effect of being “unintended” on life cycle outcomes. We use the differential timing of abortion legalization across states interacted with the mother’s religion (which facilitates or hinders legal abortion take up) to instrument for endogenous pregnancy intention. We find that being unintended causes negative outcomes (higher crime, lower schooling, lower earnings) over the life cycle. Our paper provides an initial step towards quantifying this key mechanism behind many of the well-documented long-term effects associated with changes in reproductive health policy.
KW - Abortion legalization
KW - Fertility
KW - Investment in children
KW - Unintended pregnancies
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U2 - 10.1007/s00148-014-0530-z
DO - 10.1007/s00148-014-0530-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84921921071
SN - 0933-1433
VL - 28
SP - 479
EP - 508
JO - Journal of Population Economics
JF - Journal of Population Economics
IS - 2
ER -