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IZA Discussion Paper No. 9362
September 2015
The Impact of Early Childbearing on Schooling and Cognitive Skills among Young Women in Madagascar

publishes as 'Early Childbearing, School Attainment, and Cognitive Skills: Evidence From Madagascar' in: Demography, 2018, 55 (2), 643-668

Female secondary school attendance has recently increased in Sub-Saharan Africa and so has the risk of becoming pregnant while attending school. Using panel data in Madagascar, we analyze the impact of teenage pregnancy on young women's human capital. We instrument early pregnancy with the young woman's community-level access, and exposure to condoms since age 15. We control for an extensive set of community social and economic infrastructure characteristics to deal with the endogeneity of program placement and conduct several robustness checks to validate our instruments. Early childbearing increases the likelihood of dropping out of school by 42 % and decreases the chances of completing secondary school by 44%. This school-pregnancy related dropout is associated with a reduction of 1.1 standard deviations in Math and French test scores. Delaying the first birth by a year increases the probability of current enrollment by 5% and the test scores by 0.2 standard deviations.

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Mark Fallak
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+352 585-855-526
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Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
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Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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