We analyze the effect of having a child in adolescence on high school completion,
educational attainment, and college enrollment in a developing country setting using nine
repeated rounds of Chilean household surveys that span the 1990–2009 period. We control
for selection bias and household unobservables of teen motherhood with two approaches:
different estimation methods – propensity score matching and family fixed effects for a large
sub-sample of sisters – and three different samples. Results reveal that adolescent
motherhood reduces the probability of high school completion by between 18 to 37 percent.
Furthermore, effects are heterogeneous across education groups: teen motherhood has
larger negative effects on high school completion and years of schooling among poor and
low-education households. Our results imply that policies aimed at reducing early
childbearing will have important short-term effects on young women’s education outcomes.