Understanding the Fertility-Economy Link for Teenagers

描述(申请人提供)：在1990年代，经济得到加强，青少年生育率、性活动率和避孕缺乏率急剧下降。黑人女性青少年通常比白人女性青少年经历了更大的相对经济收益，她们在生育率、性活动率和缺乏避孕措施方面下降得更多。这些模式表明，经济和与生育相关的结果之间可能存在联系。在这个项目中，我们将结合国家总体经济数据和1997年以来全国青年纵向调查的个人行为数据，以估计经济变化如何影响所有青少年和跨种族/民族的生育率及其直接决定因素--性活动、避孕使用、怀孕和堕胎的比率。我们将使用差异-无差异的方法来控制未被观察到的跨州异质性和可能影响全国青少年行为的一般性因素(例如，魔术师约翰逊宣布他患有艾滋病)。之前的研究人员已经研究了经济-生育-结果之间的联系。然而，除了使用更新的数据，这些数据涵盖了商业周期达到顶峰和随后的衰退，我们还做出了几项贡献。以前的研究使用的是狭义的经济衡量标准(例如，国家青少年就业与人口比率)，由于以小样本为基础，存在抽样误差，并受到内生性的影响，因为外生生育率冲击可能会影响经济衡量标准。我们的贡献之一是使用(1)州总失业率，该失业率几乎不应受到青少年生育率冲击的影响，而且与之前研究中使用的衡量标准相比，它受抽样误差的影响较小；(2)州就业增长率基于该州的产业构成和各州的全国产出增长率。另一个贡献是，我们将进行模拟，以确定在20世纪90年代，性活动、缺乏避孕措施、怀孕和堕胎的比率在多大程度上因经济变化而发生变化，我们将计算所有青少年和跨种族/民族的模式中有多少可以由经济变化来解释。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During the 1990s, the economy strengthened and teenage fertility and the rate of sexual activity and the lack of contraception decreased sharply. Black female teenagers, who generally experienced greater relative economic gains than white female teenagers, had even greater declines in fertility, the rate of sexual activity, and the lack of contraception. These patterns suggest that there may be a link between the economy and fertility-related outcomes. In this project, we will combine state aggregate economic data with individual behavior data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1997 to estimate how changes in the economy affect fertility and its proximate determinants--the rate of sexual activity, contraception use, pregnancies, and abortions-- for all teenagers and across race/ethnicity. We will use a difference-indifference method to control for unobserved heterogeneity across states and generic factors that would influence teenage behavior across the country (e.g., Magic Johnson's announcement that he has AIDS). Previous researchers have examined the economy-fertility-outcomes link. However, besides using more current data that spans the build up to the peak of the business cycle along with the following recession, we make several contributions. Previous studies used narrowly defined economic measures (e.g., state teenage employment-population ratio) that are subject to sampling error from being based on small samples and subject to endogeneity in that exogenous fertility shocks could affect the economic measure. One of our contributions is to use (1) the aggregate state unemployment rate, which should hardly be affected by teenage fertility shocks and is less subject to sampling error than the measures used in previous studies and (2) a state employment growth rate based on the industrial composition of the state and national output growth rates across states. Another contribution is that we will perform simulations to determine how much the rates of sexual activity, lack of contraception, pregnancies, and abortions changed in the 1990s as a result of the economic changes, and we will calculate how much of the patterns for all teenagers and across race/ethnicity can be explained by the economic changes.