Seminar Series: Teen Fatherhood & Educational Attainment: Evidence from Three Cohorts of Youth

About the Talk

While a large number of studies have explored the schooling consequences of teen motherhood, very few have examined the consequences of teen fatherhood.  Using data drawn from three cohorts of youth from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, 1979 and 1997, and the National Educational Longitudinal Survey, we examine the relationship between teen parenthood and educational attainment, with careful attention to the role of family- and individual-level unmeasured heterogeneity.  We find that teen mothers had a larger schooling penalty than teen fathers in earlier cohorts, but this difference appears to have diminished over time, with men in more recent cohorts having a larger educational penalty than for earlier cohorts.

About the Speaker

H. Elizabeth Peters, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute.  Prior to coming to the Urban Institute in 2011, she was a professor of public policy at Cornell University for 17 years and founding director of the Cornell Population Center.  Peters is an economic demographer who has published extensively on topics related to marriage, divorce, child support policy, welfare reform, child well-being, and father involvement.  Her work has appeared in prestigious journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Human Resources, and Demography, and she is the co-editor of the book Marriage and Family: Perspectives and Complexities, published by Columbia University Press in 2009.  She is currently director of the NICHD-funded Program Project Grant, Transition to Fatherhood, a project that analyzes the timing and circumstances of the transition to fatherhood and the consequences for children.