IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/apandp/v109y2019p213-17.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Reason to Wait: The Effect of Legal Status on Teen Pregnancy

Author

Listed:
  • Elira Kuka
  • Na'ama Shenhav
  • Kevin Shih

Abstract

Although teen pregnancy has been on the decline in the United States, it remains among the highest within developed countries. Hispanics, who are more likely to be undocumented immigrants, lead this trend, yet the role of legal status has yet to be considered. To investigate this question, we examine teenage fertility responses to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary legal status to undocumented youth. We find that DACA reduced the likelihood of having a teenage birth by 1.6 percentage points and eliminated roughly half of the gap in teenage childbearing between documented and undocumented women.

Suggested Citation

  • Elira Kuka & Na'ama Shenhav & Kevin Shih, 2019. "A Reason to Wait: The Effect of Legal Status on Teen Pregnancy," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 109, pages 213-217, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:apandp:v:109:y:2019:p:213-17
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20191013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20191013
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20191013.data
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pandp.20191013.ds
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gihleb, Rania & Giuntella, Osea & Lonsky, Jakub, 2023. "Dreaming of leaving the nest? Immigration status and the living arrangements of DACAmented," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    2. Gunadi, Christian, 2022. "The Fertility Effect of Laws Granting Undocumented Migrants Access to Driving Licenses in the United States," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1094, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    3. Joan Monras & Eduardo Polo-Muro & Javier Vazquez-Grenno, 2023. "Labor Market Stability and Fertility Decisions," Working Paper Series 2023-36, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • K37 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Immigration Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:apandp:v:109:y:2019:p:213-17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.