In the U.S. teen mothers are more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies than non-teen mothers. There is also substantial evidence that smoking is a risk factor correlated with low birth weight. Low birth weight is a costly outcome in both the short and long term for parents, children, and society at large. This paper examines the causal link between teen age smoking behavior and low birth weight. We use a variety of empirical techniques including fixed effects and a matching estimator to identify the impact of smoking on babies of teen and non-teen mothers. We find that both OLS and matching estimator results yield large impacts of smoking on birth weight for teens and adults. However, when we control for unobservables through a fixed effects model, the impact of smoking on birth weight is diminished and there are relatively small differences in the impact of smoking on birth weight between teens and non-teens.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13386.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13386
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
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