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Understanding Teenage Fertility, Cohabitation, and Marriage: the Case of Peru

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Understanding Teenage Fertility, Cohabitation, and Marriage: the Case of Peru IZA DP No. 10270 Understanding Teenage Fertility, Cohabitation, and Marriage: The Case of Peru Marta Favara Pablo Lavado Alan Sanchez October 2016 DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor Understanding Teenage Fertility, Cohabitation, and Marriage: The Case of Peru Marta Favara University of Oxford and IZA Pablo Lavado Universidad Pacifico Alan Sanchez GRADE Discussion Paper No. 10270 October 2016 IZA P.O. Box 7240 53072 Bonn Germany Phone: +49-228-3894-0 Fax: +49-228-3894-180 E-mail: [email protected] Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10270 October 2016 ABSTRACT Understanding Teenage Fertility, Cohabitation, and Marriage: * The Case of Peru In this study, we used data from the Young Lives study, which investigates teenage childbearing, marriage, and cohabitation by tracking a cohort of individuals from the ages of 8 to 19 years. While the present analysis does not intend to establish causality, the longitudinal nature of the data allows us to identify the combination of early circumstances and life changes that induce a higher likelihood of these events. The analysis addresses bias both due to reverse causality and community characteristics that are usually unobserved and fixed over time, a strategy that is quite unique in studies of developing countries. About 1 out of 5 females (and 1 out of 20 males) in our sample had at least one child by the age of 19, and 80 percent of them were married or cohabiting. Early marriage/cohabitation is indeed intrinsically related to early pregnancy and largely predicted by the same factors. For females specifically, girls from poor households with an absent parent for a prolonged period have a higher risk of early childbearing. Similarly, girls whose self-efficacy and educational aspirations decrease over time are more at risk of becoming a mother during adolescence. Conversely, school attendance and better school performance predict a lower risk of early pregnancy; our analysis suggests that this is largely because it postpones the first sexual relationship. JEL Classification: J13, J14, J24 Keywords: teenage fertility, cohabitation and marriage, Peru, Young Lives, longitudinal data Corresponding author: Marta Favara The Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) University of Oxford 3 Mansfield Road Oxford OX1 3TB United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] * Thanks to Grace Chang for excellent research assistance. Young Lives is an international study of childhood poverty, following the lives of 12,000 children in 4 countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam) over 15 years. www.younglives.org.uk. Young Lives is core-funded from 2001 to 2017 by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID), and co-funded by IrishAid from 2014 to 2015. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation fund aspects of Young Lives gender research (2014- 2016), including the research carried out for this paper. The views expressed are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those of, or endorsed by, Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID or other funders. 1 Introduction According to the 2012 World Bank report on teenage pregnancy, the Latin American and Caribbean region has the third highest teenage fertility rate on the globe after Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (World Bank, 2012). Teenage childbearing has progressively become a major policy concern, as the majority of studies point to a negative impact (although with significant dif- ferences in magnitude) of early fertility on parents' (mainly on mothers') out- comes and on the birth and future of the newborns (Geronimus et al., 1994; Francesconi, 2008; Levine et al., 2001; Lopez Turley, 2003; Ashcraft and Lang, 2006). Similarly, a woman's age at her first marriage { or at first cohabitation { is an important area of concern for policy in developing countries because early marriage/cohabitation might have adverse implications for her physical, men- tal, and emotional wellbeing, as well as for her educational and labour market outcomes. (see for example Field and Ambrus, 2008) Furthermore, early mar- riage/cohabitation often is not the result of a planned choice and is frequently associated with early fertility. This is certainly the case in Peru, as we will discuss later on. While policy responses have historically focused on access to health services and information, more recently a variety of social programs have been proved to be effective in reducing teen pregnancy through different channels: by enhancing school attendance through conditional cash programs (see Cort´eset al., 2016, for Familias en Accion and Subsidio Educativo in Colombia; or Lopez-Calva and Perova, 2012 for Juntos in Peru); the longer school days program in Chile extends the time that adolescents spend in protected environments (Berthelon and Kruger, 2011); and skills training programs increase adolescents' labour market opportunities, skills, and expectations about their future, as in the case of the Dominican Republic's Youth and Employment Program (Ibarrar`anet al., 2014; Novella and Ripani, 2015). Although the economic literature highlights family backgrounds, welfare, and family planning policies as the main determinants of early pregnancy, there is still a lot to learn about the factors behind the decision to have a child at a young age. In fact, studying the determinants of early childbearing, cohabita- tion, and marriage is challenging because of the multiplicity of mechanisms that lead to getting married/cohabiting and becoming a parent during adolescence. Like many other individual decisions, getting married/cohabiting and having a baby are forward-looking decisions involving preferences, expectations, and a certain degree of uncertainty. Finally, to a great extent, behavioural and psycho-social elements (such as self-control, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self- confidence) and sociocultural context (social norms, gender roles, and stereo- types) are likely to play a crucial role. This paper intends to contribute to the economic literature that investigates the origin of teenage pregnancy and early marriage/cohabitation in Peru. The ultimate objective is to improve understanding of the risk factors of one im- portant gender-related issue that has historically provoked asymmetric costs for boys and girls. First, we investigate how early cohabitation, marriage, and child- bearing vary according to early socioeconomic conditions; second, we explore to what extent the factors related to early poverty matter equally for boys and girls; third, we examine whether factors such as low aspirations and low expec- tations of future economic success, school achievement, socio-emotional compe- 2 tencies, knowledge of family planning, and sexual behaviors, can contribute to explaining teenage childbearing and marriage in disadvantaged contexts; and finally, we look at how changes in socioeconomic status, migration, and house- hold structure, as well changes in aspirations, test scores, and socio-emotional competencies during childhood and early adolescence, might have increased or decreased the probability of teenage childbearing, marriage, and cohabitation. While the present analysis does not intend to establish causality, it seeks to identify the combination of early circumstances and life changes that induce a higher likelihood of the previously mentioned events. It exploits the longitudinal nature of the Young Lives data, a unique individual-level panel following a cohort of about 635 children between ages 8 and 19. In Peru, Young Lives collects information on fertility, marital, and cohabiting status, sexual behaviors, and knowledge about sexual and reproductive health (SRH) at the ages of both 15 and 19. Furthermore, rich information at the household and individual levels is collected starting at the age of 8. This includes children's cognitive and psycho-social competencies, school history, parental expectations about their children's future, and children's educational aspirations.1 This information is used to elaborate a very rich picture of the correlates of early childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage. In the baseline specification, we look at the role of individual- and household-level characteristics observed during mid-childhood. In an extended specification, the role of changes
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