THE EFFECT OF CULTURE ON FERTILITY BEHAVIOR OF US TEEN MOTHERS.

This paper studies the impact of culture on the fertility behavior of teenage women in the US. To identify this effect, it took an epidemiological approach, exploiting the variations in teenage women's fertility rates by ancestral home country. Using three different databases (the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and the 2000 US Census), the results show that culture has quantitatively important effects on the fertility behavior of teenage women. This finding is robust to alternative specifications, to the introduction of a range of home country variables to proxy culture, and to the measurement of individual characteristics present when teenage women continue with a pregnancy to have a child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]