Consequences of Teenage Childbearing on Infant Birthweight

A large literature has looked at the causal consequences of teen births on the outcomes of mothers, but there is less research looking at the causal impacts of teen childbearing on children. Studies that examine birth outcomes show that children of teen mothers fare worse than children from older mothers but fail to adequately account for selection effects. Since teen births are often concentrated among women from worse socioeconomic backgrounds, differences in outcomes found in correlational studies may simply be due to differences in maternal background. This paper uses miscarriages to account for selection and put bounds on the effects of teen childbearing on the birthweight of children. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), early findings suggest that teen childbearing leads to an increase in low and very low birthweight babies.