We empirically study the impact of massive and sudden school closures on teenage pregnancy, following the 2011 nationwide student strike in Chile.
Temporary high schools’ shutdown increases teenage pregnancies in 1.5% on average, while places in the highest tercile of strike exposure experienced an increase of 5%. This effect vanishes three quarters after the strike’s onset and is entirely driven by first-time mothers.
The sudden and unexpected closure of schools allows interpreting these findings as mirroring an incapacitation effect of schools rather than human capital accumulation as a mechanism for the causal relationship between students’ strikes and teenage pregnancies.
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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)