The unintended: negative outcomes over the life cycle

Wanchuan Lin () and Juan Pantano ()

Journal of Population Economics, 2015, vol. 28, issue 2, 479-508

Abstract: 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 Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Abortion legalization; Unintended pregnancies; Fertility; Investment in children; J13; J11; I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00148-014-0530-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:28:y:2015:i:2:p:479-508

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-014-0530-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().