Understanding Teenage Fertility Decline

Jacob A. Klerman, RAND
Berna M. Torr, RAND

Since the early 1990s, births to 15–17-years-olds dropped more than 40 percent; births to 18–19-year-olds dropped by only about 25 percent. In contrast, births to 20–24-year-olds were stable, and births to older women rose rapidly (20 to 64 percent). Most studies have attempted to explain teenage fertility decline using the 1988 and 1995 NSFG, which only included the beginning of the teenage fertility decline. The new 2002 NSFG data provide an opportunity to explore these issues using more current data and a unified approach. We pool the 1988, 1995, and 2002 waves of the NSFG to disaggregate fertility decline, contraceptive failure rates, sexual activity and method choice, exploring main effects, demographic interactions, and calendar year interactions. The estimation of the entire model from a single data set allows us to consistently estimate standard errors via the bootstrap. We then simulate changes in proximate determinants of fertility and bootstrap estimates of the sampling variability of those simulations.