Teenage mothers and the next generation: benefits of delay?

Abstract

This paper investigates whether delaying motherhood beyond the teenage years benefits children. We account for selection into teenage motherhood in two parallel ways: We compare children with their cousins and we exploit miscarriages as a natural experiment that induces some women to postpone childbirth. Across the two strategies, we find no or limited effects of teenage motherhood on children’s health and educational outcomes. When we use women delaying motherhood to their early twenties as a counterfactual for teenage mothers, we show suggestive evidence that the effects of such delays are nil across outcomes for both strategies.