This is how the people who were there remember it. A special investigation. Sat 14 Mar O n 1 September , a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights.
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Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to preexisting differences, or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, in this article, I use an instrumental variables IV approach that takes advantage of variation in state laws regulating the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The baseline IV estimate indicates that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood LIML estimation and a control function approach.
BACKGROUND AND QUESTIONS
The film starred Maggie Lawson and was directed by Mark Rosman. Alex Burroughs is a shy, insecure teen girl who dreams of becoming a fashion designer. While helping her father with his catering business at a party, she meets Janine Adams, a famous teenage model. Meanwhile, Janine is fed up with her manager mother making her life nothing but work. Especially after not being home when she has her first book signing, because her little brother Max is going on a publicity tour.
The high levels of depression among teenage mothers have received considerable research attention in smaller targeted samples, but a large-scale examination of the complex relationship between adolescent childbearing and psychological distress that explores bidirectional causality is needed. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health Add Health and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort, we found that teenage mothers had higher levels of distress than their childless adolescent peers and adult mothers, but the experience of teenage childbearing did not appear to be the cause. We also found that distress did not increase the likelihood of adolescent childbearing except among poor teenagers. In this group, experiencing high levels of distress markedly increased the probability of becoming a teenage mother. Among nonpoor teenage girls, the relationship between distress and subsequent teenage childbearing was spurious. Teenage childbearing continues to be framed as an important social and public health problem in America Furstenberg Activists, pundits, and researchers have paid particular attention to the economic and social consequences of adolescent parenthood Hoffman Most of this work is grounded in the apprehension that high levels of depression in this particularly vulnerable group could have negative consequences for both mother and child. Yet few of the many studies addressing this topic have analyzed nationally representative, longitudinal data.
