Summary of The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (Part 5)
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Column 4 mirrors column 2, except the abortion law variable is replaced by a continuous measure, abortion rate in an individual’s state of birth when the individual was 18-21. The estimates show a large negative and statistically significant impact. Changes in access to abortion can explain a 2.6% decrease in the fraction marrying by 23 from the pre-1949 to the 1957 birth cohorts. The continuous measure reduces the magnitude and significance of the abortion law dummy.
e. Column 5 shows that the inclusion of state of birth linear time trends restores the significant effect of birth control access, and the abortion rate effect becomes small and insignificant.
f. Columns 6 and 7 include dummies for earliest age of legal access to birth control for each state of birth and year of birth group. Pill access by age 17 has a significant negative effect on the dependent variable in models including and not including state of birth trends and abortion access controls. Column 8 preserves these results, even when the sample is expanded to contain all women with at least one year of college.
g. Column 9 shows significant negative effects of pill access by age 17 and 18-20 on marriage by 23 when the sample contains all with at least some college.
2) Career and Marital Status Outcomes: Aggregate Cohort Analysis
a. Lacking an ideal data set containing information on pill access and usage, educational investments, and life cycle career attainment and medical status, Katz and Goldin rely on an aggregate cohort analysis based on U.S. population censuses from 1970, 1980, and 1990.
b. Analysis: unit of analysis is age/year cell; 20 age groups (30-49) across three census years, yielding 60 observations and covering 1921-1960 birth cohorts of college graduate women born in the U.S.
c. Regression: Share of age group a experiencing a particular career or marital status outcome in year t age dummies census year dummies race controls measure of access/usage of birth control as young women measure of access/usage of abortion as young women.
d. The intuition for the specification is to observe successive cohorts at the same ages and see whether changes from one cohort to the other in pill and abortion access had a relationship to changes in career and marital status.
IV. The Case for the Power of the Pill
1) Despite the 1960 approval of the pill by the FDA and its rapid spread among married women, legal barriers prevented young, unmarried women from using the pill until the late 60s to early 70s
2) The lowering of the age of majority and increase in the rights of minors played a key role.
3) More lenient laws led to greater use of the pill, directly producing an increase in the age at first marriage and the fraction of women entering professional schools (and hence entering professional careers).
V. Alternative Explanations
1) Abortion: oral contraceptives had a far wider effect than abortion. College women did not depend on abortion as they did on the pill for safe, effective, and painless contraception.
2) Changes in the sex ratio (the ratio of men to women of marriageable age): the ratio may affect female marriage rates and incentives to invest in careers. Since women typically married men 2-3 years older, women born early in the baby boom should have faced poorer marriage market conditions than did those born later.
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