Browsing by Author "Jorquera-Samter, Valentina"

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    Access to Higher Education and Adolescent Fertility in Chile
    (2023) Salinas, Viviana; Jorquera-Samter, Valentina; Wiegand-Cruz, Pilar
    This study investigates gender differences in the association between adolescent fertility and the likelihood of initiating higher education among young Chilean men and women. We adopt an entropy balancing strategy to estimate the association between adolescent fertility and the likelihood of starting higher education while accounting for potential selection into early childbearing due to socioeconomic status and prior academic achievement. We use data from official national registers that cover a cohort of Chilean students who attended publicly funded schools and who successfully completed secondary schooling between 2011 and 2022. Our results indicate that adolescent mothers are 15 percentage points less likely to initiate higher education than their peers who did not give birth during adolescence. In comparison, teenage fathers are 20 percentage points less likely to do so than their childless counterparts. Our findings stand in contrast to previously identified disadvantage patterns for secondary school completion, whereby adolescent fertility more significantly hinders schooling completion for women relative to men. We contend that this reversal may be related to traditional gender-role expectations in Chile, which encourage young fathers to act as providers and, therefore, may be prevented from continuing on their education path into tertiary studies.
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    Adolescent fertility and high school completion in Chile: Exploring gender differences
    (2022) Salinas, Viviana; Jorquera-Samter, Valentina
    OBJECTIVE This study has two objectives: first, to estimate the effect of adolescent fertility on high school completion for Chilean adolescents, considering selectivity due to socioeconomic background and prior academic achievement, and, second, to explore the gender differences that exist in this effect. METHODS We use propensity score weighting and regression adjustment to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated groups. We employ a rich dataset built on several administrative sources, covering a cohort of students attending publicly funded schools from 2011 to 2018. RESULTS Considering the samples of men and women separately, we find that a teenage girl who experiences adolescent fertility is 13% less likely to complete high school, whereas the corresponding probability for a teenage boy is only 3%. As compared to boys, girls who experience adolescent fertility also have higher probabilities of delayed high school graduation and dropping out of school. CONCLUSIONS Our analyses indicate that the detrimental effect of adolescent fertility on high school completion is larger for girls than boys in Chile, after taking into consideration the selectivity due to socioeconomic origin and prior academic performance. CONTRIBUTION This is the first study in Chile, and probably the first in Latin America, that directly estimates the difference in the effect of adolescent fertility on educational outcomes for young men and women, considering issues of endogeneity due to treatment selection. Our results point to continuing gender inequity because adolescent mothers suffer more negative effects of fertility than adolescent fathers.