The effects of minimum legal drinking ages on teen childbearing

This study provides empirical evidence on the structural relationship between alcohol use and teen childbearing by exploiting the exogenous variation in youth alcohol availability generated by changes in state minimum legal drinking ages. The reduced-form childbearing models are based on state-level panel data and two-way fixed effect specifications as well as models that incorporate as controls the contemporaneous childbearing data from older women who were unaffected by the state changes in youth alcohol policy. The results indicate that alcohol availability and use have large, independent, and statistically significant effects on childbearing among black teens but not necessarily among white teens.