Alcohol Consumption and Pregnancies Among Youth: Evidence from a Semi-Parametric Approach

33 Pages Posted: 1 Jul 2011 Last revised: 4 Mar 2012

See all articles by Inna Cintina

Inna Cintina

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Date Written: February 21, 2012

Abstract

Despite a well-established correlation between alcohol intake and various risk-taking sexual behaviors, the causality remains unknown. The observed association can be easily attributed to the influence of unobserved individual characteristics rather than the influence of substance use. I model the effect of alcohol use on the likelihood of pregnancy among youth using a variety of estimation techniques. The preference is given to the semi-parametric model where the cumulative distribution of heterogeneity is approximated by a 4-point discrete distribution. Using data on 17-28 year-old women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that alcohol consumption increases the likelihood of pregnancy by 4.7 percentage points. Quantitatively similar but statistically weaker effects were found in the fully parametric models such as the two-stage least squares model and the bivariate probit model. Finally, the fully parametric models that ignore the effect of unobserved heterogeneity failed to establish this relationship.

Keywords: Alcohol use, Youth pregnancy rate, Bivariate probit, Discrete factor approximation estimator, Endogeneity

JEL Classification: J13, C14, C30

Suggested Citation

Cintina, Inna, Alcohol Consumption and Pregnancies Among Youth: Evidence from a Semi-Parametric Approach (February 21, 2012). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1876031 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1876031

Inna Cintina (Contact Author)

University of Hawaii at Manoa ( email )

University of Hawaii
2424 Maile Way, Saunders 540
Honolulu, HI 96822
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.uhero.hawaii.edu/17/people

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