Can beer taxes affect teen pregnancy? Evidence based on teen abortion rates and birth rates.

Extract

---

Can beer taxes affect teen pregnancy? Evidence based on teen abortion rates and birth rates.

1. Introduction

In the United States, teen pregnancy rates continue to be higher than in comparable developed nations like Sweden, Canada, or France (Darroch, Frost, and Singh 2001; Levine 2001). The effects of teen pregnancy are problematic, given the evidence that teen childbearing has dire educational, economic, and perhaps psychological consequences for the teen mothers as well as adverse consequences for their children. While a teen pregnancy may be terminated via abortion to prevent these consequences, there still remains the concern that the very experience of being pregnant and having to undergo the abortion might have adverse psychological and physiological effects for a teen woman. Hence, given the potential individual and social costs associated with teen pregnancy, there has been considerable interest in empirically investigating its determinants for the purpose of effective policy formulation.

A number of studies have emphasized the positive relationships between alcohol use and outcomes like risky sexual activity and childbearing among youth. This leads to the conjecture that teen alcohol use increases the risk of teen pregnancy via effects on participation in sexual intercourse and contraception use. Therefore, policies that reduce teen alcohol use may also have the positive externality of reducing teen pregnancy. One such possible policy is increased tax rates on alcohol. This study focuses on the effects of state beer taxes on two alternate pregnancy outcomes--state-level abortion rates and birth rates--among women aged 15-19 years. The results suggest that increasing beer taxes can bring about reductions in teen abortion rates, but the reductions are likely to be rather small in magnitude. There is less evidence to suggest that increasing beer taxes will reduce teen birth rates.

2. Background

The associational relationship between alcohol use and 'pregnancy-risk' behavior is well established. For example, Butcher, Thompson, and O'Neal (1991) report that, among young college students, 57% of women stated that they had sexual intercourse 1-5 times primarily because they were intoxicated. Cooper, Peiree, and Huselid (1994) and Shrier et al. (1996) present evidence that higher alcohol use is associated with more frequent sexual intercourse, sexual intercourse with relative strangers, and noncontracepted sexual intercourse among teens. Additionally, there is evidence that alcohol use is associated with early initiation into sexual activity (Bentler and Newcomb 1986; Mott and Haurin 1988; Staton et al. 1999) and greater likelihood of teen motherhood (Mensch and Kandel 1992). The association between alcohol use and 'risky' sexual activity or teen motherhood does not in itself prove causality because both sets of problem behaviors may be driven by an underlying penchant for risk-taking or rebelliousness, in which case reducing access to alcohol for teens, in itself, may not affect teen pregnancy. While some studies in the economic literature have tried to account for the potential endogeneity between alcohol use and risky ...

See the full content of this document

---