Secondary Schools and Teenage Childbearing: Evidence from the School Expansion in Brazilian Municipalities

This article investigates the effect that increasing secondary education opportunities have on teenage fertility in Brazil. Using a novel dataset to exploit variation from a 57 percent increase in secondary schools across 4,884 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2009, the analysis shows an important role of secondary school availability on underage fertility. An increase of one school per 100 females reduces a cohort's teenage birthrate by between 0.250 and 0.563 births per 100, or a reduction of one birth for roughly every 50 to 100 students who enroll in secondary education. The results highlight the important role of access to education leading to spillovers in addition to improving educational attainment.

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

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.

The potential pitfalls of studying adult sex ratios at aggregate levels in humans

Human adult sex ratios have been studied extensively across the biological and social sciences. While several studies have examined adult sex ratio effects in a multilevel perspective, many studies have focused on effects at an aggregated level only. In this paper, we review some key issues relating to such analyses. We address not only nation-level analyses, but also aggregation at lower levels, to investigate whether these issues extend to lower levels of aggregation. We illustrate these issues with novel databases covering a broad range of variables. Specifically, we discuss distributional issues with aggregated measures of adult sex ratio, significance testing, and statistical non-independence when using aggregate data. Firstly, we show that there are severe distributional issues with national adult sex ratio, such as extreme cases. Secondly, we demonstrate that many ‘meaningless’ variables are significantly correlated with adult sex ratio (e.g. the max. elevation level correlates with sex ratio at US state level). Finally, we re-examine associations between adult sex ratios and teenage fertility and find no robust evidence for an association at the aggregate level. Our review highlights the potential issues of using aggregate data on adult sex ratios to test hypotheses from an evolutionary perspective in humans. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Adult sex ratios and reproductive decisions: a critical re-examination of sex differences in human and animal societies’.

Entry into motherhood during adolescence in France: A sociodemographic and spatial analysis of the determinants and profiles

En France métropolitaine, le niveau de fécondité des adolescentes (femmes de 18 ans et moins) varie d’une région à une autre. Cet article montre d’abord que les différences régionales ne résistent pas à une standardisation par des caractéristiques sociodémographiques de la population des adolescentes. L’autre résultat important est la mise en évidence de quatre profils de mères adolescentes, profils inégalement répartis dans les régions métropolitaines.In mainland France and Corsica, the level of teenage fertility (of women aged 18 and less) varies from one region to another. This article shows that these regional differences do not remain once standardizing for the sociodemographic characteristics of the female teenage population. The article then highlights from profiles of teenage mothers which are unequally distributed amongst the French regions.