Heterogeneous Effects of Sex Education on U.S. Teen Birth Rates

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Abstract

Over the past three decades, federal and state governments have invested significant resources in sex education, partly with the goal of reducing the teen birth rate. In this paper, we leverage variation between counties and over time in federal funding from 2002 to 2016 to provide the first estimates of whether this investment in sex education had a causal effect on teen birth rates at the population level. We differentiate between abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education, and find that while abstinence-only education increased or had no effect on the teen birth rate, comprehensive sex education consistently decreased the rate at which teens aged 14-19 gave birth. These effects were almost three times larger for the youngest women than the oldest.

Authors

• Nicholas Mark, New York University

• Lawrence L. Wu, New York University