Early Childbearing, Human Capital Attainment, and Mortality Risk: Evidence from a Longitudinal Demographic Surveillance Area in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

摘要

We examine the relationship between teen fertility and both subsequent educational outcomes and mortality risk in rural South Africa. We use a rich longitudinal data set from the Africa Centre Demographic Information System that allows us to control for multiple characteristics of the teen mothers and their households at an early age before childbearing. We find that teenage fertility is associated with disadvantages in education levels and with higher risk of mortality at a young age. In a setting where two-thirds of women have given birth by age 21, our evidence shows that fertility timing matters. Teen mothers have significantly worse educational outcomes than women who delay their first birth until at least age 20, and these effects are more pronounced for the youngest teen mothers. Although a portion of women remain enrolled in school at age 20, the vast majority (90%) has either dropped out or completed high school by then. Delaying birth until that point is evidently less disruptive to the woman's education. Our findings on educational outcomes do not seem attributable to adverse prefertility characteristics and are robust to multiple methodologies of estimation. We use OLS models, propensity score matching, and sibling fixed effects and find consistent results.