IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/100874.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Age of Majority and Women’s Early Human Capital Accumulation in Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Cragun, Randy
  • Chatterjee, Ishita

Abstract

Past research has suggested that Common Law restrictions may have prevented minors from obtaining oral contraceptives (the pill) without parental consent and that, thus, reductions in the age at which a woman became a legal adult could work through access to the pill to increase incomes, educational attainment, and participation in occupations previously dominated by men, but these age of majority changes are often confounded with other relevant legal changes. Because Australian states had similar reasons for lowering their ages of majority around the same time as US states did but did not enact other youth consent or pill access measures around the same time, we use state-specific variation in Australian age of majority laws and estimate effects on schooling attainment and life-cycle incomes, finding that living under an age of majority of 18 rather than 21 decreased women's weekly earnings slightly in their 20s and increased their earnings at later ages and increased their probability of bachelor degree attainment by around 1.5 percentage points (from a baseline of 14%).

Suggested Citation

  • Cragun, Randy & Chatterjee, Ishita, 2020. "Age of Majority and Women’s Early Human Capital Accumulation in Australia," MPRA Paper 100874, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 25 May 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:100874
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100874/1/MPRA_paper_100874.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cragun, Randy, 2019. "Effects of lower ages of majority on oral contraceptive use: Evidence on the validity of The Power of the Pill," MPRA Paper 100871, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 03 Jun 2020.
    2. Mincer, Jacob, 1997. "The Production of Human Capital and the Life Cycle of Earnings: Variations on a Theme," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(1), pages 26-47, January.
    3. Martha J. Bailey, 2013. "Fifty Years of Family Planning: New Evidence on the Long-Run Effects of Increasing Access to Contraception," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 44(1 (Spring), pages 341-409.
    4. Steingrimsdottir, Herdis, 2016. "Reproductive rights and the career plans of U.S. college freshmen," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 29-41.
    5. Martha J. Bailey, 2006. "More Power to the Pill: The Impact of Contraceptive Freedom on Women's Life Cycle Labor Supply," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(1), pages 289-320.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cragun, Randy, 2019. "Effects of lower ages of majority on oral contraceptive use: Evidence on the validity of The Power of the Pill," MPRA Paper 100871, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 03 Jun 2020.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cragun, Randy, 2019. "Effects of lower ages of majority on oral contraceptive use: Evidence on the validity of The Power of the Pill," MPRA Paper 100871, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 03 Jun 2020.
    2. Finlay, Jocelyn E., 2021. "Women’s reproductive health and economic activity: A narrative review," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    3. Fischer, Stefanie & Royer, Heather & White, Corey, 2018. "The impacts of reduced access to abortion and family planning services on abortions, births, and contraceptive purchases," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 43-68.
    4. Mølland, Eirin, 2016. "Benefits from delay? The effect of abortion availability on young women and their children," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 6-28.
    5. Martha Bailey & Olga Malkova & Zoë M. McLaren, 2017. "Does Parents' Access to Family Planning Increase Children's Opportunities? Evidence from the War on Poverty and the Early Years of Title X," Working Papers 2017-083, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    6. Dimico, Arcangelo, 2024. "The Effect of Abortion Policies on Fertility and Human Capital in Sub-Saharan Africa," QBS Working Paper Series 2024/06, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Business School.
    7. Ruthbah, Ummul, 2020. "Does lower fertility empower women? Evidence from rural Bangladesh," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 36(C).
    8. Bailey, Martha J., 2022. "Economic opportunity begins with contraception: Comment on “Intergenerational Mobility Begins Before Birth” by Ananth Seshadri, Anson Zhou," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 21-23.
    9. David E. Bloom & Dara Lee Luca, 2016. "The Global Demography of Aging: Facts, Explanations, Future," PGDA Working Papers 13016, Program on the Global Demography of Aging.
    10. Martha J. Bailey & Vanessa Wanner Lang & Alexa Prettyman & Iris Vrioni & Lea J. Bart & Daniel Eisenberg & Paula Fomby & Jennifer Barber & Vanessa Dalton, 2023. "How Costs Limit Contraceptive Use among Low-Income Women in the U.S.: A Randomized Control Trial," NBER Working Papers 31397, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Bloom, D.E. & Luca, D.L., 2016. "The Global Demography of Aging," Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, in: Piggott, John & Woodland, Alan (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 3-56, Elsevier.
    12. Damian Clarke, 2018. "Children And Their Parents: A Review Of Fertility And Causality," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 518-540, April.
    13. Johanna Catherine Maclean & Ioana Popovici & Christopher J. Ruhm, 2023. "Does Paid Sick Leave Facilitate Reproductive Choice?," NBER Working Papers 31801, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Kevin Lang Jr. & Russell Weinstein Jr., 2015. "The Consequences of Teenage Childbearing before Roe v. Wade," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(4), pages 169-197, October.
    15. de Silva, Tiloka & Tenreyroa, Silvana, 2017. "Population control policies and fertility convergence," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 86158, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Jakob Madsen & Holger Strulik, 2023. "Testing unified growth theory: Technological progress and the child quantity‐quality tradeoff," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 14(1), pages 235-275, January.
    17. Celhay, Pablo A. & Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio & Riquelme, Cristina, 2024. "When a strike strikes twice: Massive student mobilizations and teenage pregnancy in Chile," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    18. Steingrimsdottir, Herdis, 2020. "The decreased popularity of the teaching sector in the 1970s," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    19. Iva Trako, 2018. "Fertility and Parental Labor-Force Participation: New Evidence from a Developing Country in the Balkans," PSE Working Papers halshs-01828471, HAL.
    20. Tiloka de Silva & Silvana Tenreyro, 2017. "Population Control Policies and Fertility Convergence," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(4), pages 205-228, Fall.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    the pill; age of majority; power of the pill; human capital; earnings; schooling; education; early legal access;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D10 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - General
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:100874. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.