The Heterogeneous Treatment Effect of Teenage Childbearing on Educational Attainment

Kiwoong Park , University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)

To examine how adolescent women differently respond to teenage childbearing from the causal perspective, this study employs the smoothing-differencing (SD) method, which is a propensity score analysis developed to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects (Xie, Brand, and Jann 2012). By using the SD method with the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), this study not only addresses the selection bias from pre-treatment heterogeneity, but also appropriately analyzes the heterogeneous treatment effects of teenage childbearing on years of education. The heterogeneity pattern of teenage childbearing is presented by taking the differences in the years of education of the control group and the treatment group (Xie et al. 2012). I also conduct auxiliary analyses that investigate potential mechanisms that may explain the heterogeneity pattern.

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 Presented in Session 2. Children & Youth