The Long-Term Impacts of Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy on Labor Market Outcomes

The literature on teenage pregnancy all find negative impacts on women’s educational attainment and earnings (see for example: Amendah 2007). Research conducted on sex education concludes that there is minimal evidence that sex education affects teenage birth rates (see for example: Oettinger 1999). In this paper, I study how the interaction between the two has the potential to further impact labor market outcomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate two linear probability models: labor force participation and wages. The findings for labor force participation imply that a woman who had sex education when they were young but became pregnant as a teenager anyway have substantially worse labor force participation rates. The interaction effect between teenage pregnancy and sex education was negative. Results for wages show that women who had a teenage pregnancy had lower wages relative to women that were not teenage mothers if they did not have sex education. Sex education does not appear to effect log wages for women who did not have a teenage birth. I find no interaction effect of sex education and teenage pregnancy on wages