Misallocated Talent: Teen Pregnancy, Education and Job Sorting in Colombia
Resumen
Policy makers and international organizations often argue that teenage pregnancy affects girls’ life trajectories by, for example, limiting their employment opportunities. These concerns are amplified in regions with high teen pregnancy rates such as Latin America. We use a unique dataset from Colombia that allows us to instrument for early motherhood with the age at menarche. We find that teen pregnancy reduces school attainment and increases the number of children ever born. However, when considering eight indicators of labor supply, including labor force participation, type of job and occupation while accounting for multiple hypothesis testing, we find that much (if not all) of the negative effects on labor supply attributed to teen motherhood are due to selection. Our findings weaken the claim that early motherhood leads to a path of low-quality employment or a misallocation of talent due to job sorting. We discuss the role that family network and co-residence plays as a mechanism to buffer the effects of early motherhood on labor
supply.
Materia
País / Región
Fecha
2021-04-20Citar de esta publicación
Item perteneciente a la Colección
Autor
Agüero, Jorge M.Items Relacionados
Motherhood, Pregnancy or Marriage Effects
The existence of large child penalties on women’s labor market outcomes has been documented for multiple countries and time periods. In this paper, we ...
Motherhood and the missing women in the labor market
Motherhood currently stands out as a key determinant of the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Studies identifying the effect of children have mostly ...
The role of unwanted childbirths on female wages and education
This paper documents how unwanted childbirths relate to women’s education and wages. Unwanted childbirths, especially early in life, can affect women’s ...