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| Amee Kamdar | ||||||
| PhD Candidate in Economics Graduate School of Business University of Chicago | ||||||
I am on the job market and will be available for interviews at the AEA meetings on January 4-6, 2008 in New Orleans, LA. | ||||||
Phone: (773) 354-0220 | ||||||
| akamdar@chicagogsb.edu | ||||||
| Research Interests | ||||||
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| Primary: | Applied Microeconomics, Health Economics, Labor Economics, and Law and Economics | |||||
| Secondary: | Industrial Organization | |||||
| Job Market Paper | ||||||
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| Male Incarceration and Teen Fertility | ||||||
| ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the increase in young male incarceration rates played a significant role in the decline in teen birth rates during the 1990s. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census microdata, I show that incarcerating one additional white (black) male is associated with 0.26 (0.11) fewer births to low-income white (black) teens per year. Relative to the average number of teen births fathered by young white (black) males per year, this is 5 (1.1) times higher. My results imply that the observed increase in male incarceration between 1980 and 2000 led to a 6% percent decline in teen fertility. Teen fertility is negatively related only to the incarceration rates of males empirically likely to father the babies of teen mothers, such as 20 year-old males or males of the same race. The basic pattern of the results across ages, income quintiles, and racial groups suggests a causal interpretation of the relationship. Instrumenting for incarceration with court orders on jail overcrowding magnifies the negative relationship considerably. My results demonstrate that (1) incarceration may have important social consequences that extend beyond reducing crime and (2) models of bargaining power in mating markets should allow for heterogeneity in the types of male sexual partners. | ||||||
| References | ||||||
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| Steven Levitt (chair) | Department of Economics | (773)702-6576 | slevitt@uchicago.edu | |||
| Gary Becker | Department of Economics | (773)702-8168 | gbecker@uchicago.edu | |||
| Jonathan Guryan | Graduate School of Business | (773) 834-5967 | jguryan@chicagogsb.edu | |||
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