Teen Smoking and Birth Outcomes / MaryBeth Walker, Erdal Tekin, Sally Wallace.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walker, MaryBeth.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Tekin, Erdal.

Wallace, Sally.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13386.

NBER working paper series no. w13386

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2007.

Summary:

In the U.S. teen mothers are more likely to give birth to low birth weight babies than non-teen mothers. There is also substantial evidence that smoking is a risk factor correlated with low birth weight. Low birth weight is a costly outcome in both the short and long term for parents, children, and society at large. This paper examines the causal link between teen age smoking behavior and low birth weight. We use a variety of empirical techniques including fixed effects and a matching estimator to identify the impact of smoking on babies of teen and non-teen mothers. We find that both OLS and matching estimator results yield large impacts of smoking on birth weight for teens and adults. However, when we control for unobservables through a fixed effects model, the impact of smoking on birth weight is diminished and there are relatively small differences in the impact of smoking on birth weight between teens and non-teens.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2007.