Evaluating policy changes that occur everywhere at the same time is difficult because of the lack of a clear counterfactual. Hoping to address this problem, researchers often proxy for differential exposure using some observed characteristic in the pre-treatment period. As a cautionary tale of...

We reassess recent and widely reported evidence that the MTV program 16 and Pregnant played a major role in reducing teen birth rates in the U.S. since it began broadcasting in 2009 (Kearney and Levine, American Economic Review 2015). We find Kearney and Levine's identification strategy to be...

I first replicate Donohue and Levitt's results for violent and property crime arrest rates. I apply their data and specification to an analysis of age-specific homicide rates and murder arrest rates. The coefficients on the abortion rate have the wrong sign for two of the four measures of crime...

This paper makes contributions to the estimation of health production functions and the economics of fertility control. We present the first infant health production functions that simultaneously control for self selection in the resolution of pregnancies as live births or induced abortions and...

We describe how the COVID-19 pandemic affected reproductive choices in New York City, the most acutely impacted area of the United States. We contrast changes in New York City with reproductive outcomes in the rest of the US. We find that births to New York City residents fell 8.4% more between...

Twenty-six states require that women seeking an abortion wait between 18 and 72 hours after receipt of counseling before the abortion can be completed. Thirteen states require that the counseling be given in person necessitating at least two visits to the provider. In April of 2015, Arkansas...

We analyze the relationship between prenatal WIC participation and birth outcomes in New York City from 1988-2001. The analysis is unique for several reasons. First, we restrict the analysis to women on Medicaid and or WIC who have no previous live births and who initiate prenatal care within...