This paper studies the effects of abortion access on fertility and women’s career outcomes. To establish causality, we leverage a policy change that in 2014 increased the eligibility age cutoff for free abortion in Israel. We use newly constructed administrative data that allows us to track abortions, births, employment, earnings, and formal education for the universe of Israeli women over a seven-year period.
We show that access to free abortion increases the abortion rate but does not increase conceptions. Instead, the result is driven by more abortions among poor women who live in religious communities in which abortion is socially stigmatized. This finding suggests that when abortion is free, poor women do not need to consult family members for financial support, which allows them to have an abortion in private.
In the medium-run, access to free abortion delays parenthood, increases human capital investment, and shifts employment towards the white-collar sector, suggesting a large career opportunity cost of unplanned parenthood. Finally, we show that if the government’s objective is to remove financial constraints to abortion access, means-tested funding does a better job than the existing age-based policy.
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More information on this seminar can be found on VERBseminar.org. Registration is required and can also be done there.
Organisers
- Tinna Laufey Ásgeirsdóttir (University of Iceland)
- Ana Inés Balsa (Universidad de Montevideo)
- John Cawley (Cornell University)
- Hans van Kippersluis (Erasmus University Rotterdam)