What Drove the Decline in U.S. Teen Childbearing? A Cross-Cohort Decomposition

Abstract

The U.S. teen birth rate fell by roughly three-quarters between its 1991 peak and the early 2020s, one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of the period. This paper asks which economic mechanisms drove the decline and how they interacted. I estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of schooling, work, marriage, and fertility separately on two cohorts of women—the NLSY79 (teens in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and the NLSY97 (teens around 2000)—that together span the bulk of the decline. Comparing the estimated model across cohorts, I decompose the change in early childbearing into the contributions of distinct economic primitives, including the returns to schooling and work, the cost and effectiveness of fertility control, schooling costs, the marriage market, and preferences for children. By isolating the primitives behind early childbearing, the analysis contributes to explaining the causes of the broader decline in fertility in the United States and elsewhere.

Agustin Diaz Casanueva

Economist

I study how households make economic decisions about consumption, fertility, and labor supply in response to shocks and policy changes.