Guldi, Melanie --- "A Survey of the Literature on Early Legal Access to the Birth Control Pill and its Influence on Young Women’s Fertility, Education, Career and Labor Supply" [2011] ELECD 603; in Cohen, R. Lloyd; Wright, D. Joshua (eds), "Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law

Editor(s): Cohen, R. Lloyd; Wright, D. Joshua

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848444379

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: A Survey of the Literature on Early Legal Access to the Birth Control Pill and its Influence on Young Women’s Fertility, Education, Career and Labor Supply

Author(s): Guldi, Melanie

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

11 A survey of the literature on early legal access to
the birth control pill and its influence on young
women's fertility, education, career and labor
supply*
Melanie Guldi**


1 INTRODUCTION

Young women and teens in particular are on the precipice of making decisions that can
significantly affect their life course. These decisions may influence myriad outcomes of
interest to researchers and policy makers, including but certainly not limited to fertility,
marriage, household formation and allocation of household resources, career choice, and
labor market participation. Furthermore, women's decisions in these areas may in turn
influence the next generation's outcomes. It is difficult, however, to study these outcomes
because to do so one has to contend with a tremendous amount of endogeneity. Like
many areas of policy interest, the trick is to identify an appropriate strategy to disentangle
cause from effect.
State-cohort variation produced by legislative changes, judicial decisions and state
policy changes during the late 1960s and early 1970s that enabled many young women
to obtain the birth control pill (the Pill) and abortion services, has recently been identi-
fied by researchers1 as a plausible source of exogenous variation. Figure 11.1 provides
an illustration on how dramatically fertility and marriage decisions changed from 1950
to 1980. In this chapter, I discuss the work by researchers who have used legal vari-
ation to study whether, and if so by how much, a change in the cost of reproductive
control affects socio-economic outcomes. My review is ...