Despite declines over the past few decades, the United States has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy compared to other industrialized nations. American Indian youth have experienced higher rates of teen pregnancy compared to the overall population for decades. Although it's known that community and cultural adaptation enhance program effectiveness, few teen pregnancy prevention programs...

Although teen childbearing connotes negative outcomes for the mothers, we know little about the effects on the children of being born to a teen mother. We explore some of the possible health and medical care consequences associated with having a teenage mother. The 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES), a nationally representative data set, is the data source we use to examine the con...

Despite its apparent distance from the core topics of economics, economists have been attracted to, and deeply engaged in, research about teen fertility for more than a quarter century. Research has focused on two broad, interrelated issues: the socio-economic consequences of a teen birth and the socio-economic causes of a teen birth. In researching these issues, economists have drawn on and ex...

This paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing. Our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show. We implement an instrumental variables (IV ) strategy using local area MTV ratings data from a pre-period to predict local area 16 and Pregnant ratings. The r...

The prevalence of bullying among children, and the sometimes tragic consequences as a result, has become a major concern in schools. The larger research for this study reported on in-depth interviews with 28 elementary and middle school-age boys and girls (7-12 years) who had experienced various forms of bullying and relational aggression by their peers, mostly on school grounds, and the respon...

The NLSY data indicate that about 7.3 percent of teenage males become fathers and that very few of these fathers live with their children. Father absence and the concurrent increase in femaleheaded households are closely associated with the impoverishment of children. Most absent teen fathers never come into contact with the child support enforcement program, and the extent to which they financ...