Are you (not) expecting? The unforeseen benefits of job training on teenage pregnancy

Laura Ripani,Rafael Novella

doi:10.1186/s40175-016-0065-7

Laura Ripani, Rafael Novella

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40175-016-0065-7

Copy DOI

Abstract

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the program reduces the probability of teenage pregnancy by 8 percentage points (about 20 %), particularly among teenagers who are not already mothers. The program seems to affect teenage pregnancy through improvements in soft skills and expectations, among other channels. In addition, we find that the program plays a protective role for teenagers from more deprived backgrounds.

Highlights

Teenage pregnancy is among the most pervasive problems affecting the social and economic empowerment of young women around the world
The Dominican Republic, after Nicaragua, is the most affected country within Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC),1 with 100 births per 1000 women ages 15–19.2 This paper studies the effects of one of the country’s youth training programs, Juventud y Empleo (JE), on teenage pregnancy and shows that improving youths’ soft skills and personal expectations reduces the incidence of pregnancy at a young age
This paper is different mainly in that (i) our definition of teenage pregnancy considers a how many times a woman has been pregnant, not just if a woman is pregnant at the moment of the follow-up survey; (ii) we attempt to estimate the simultaneous effect of JE on soft skills and teenage pregnancy; (iii) we estimate whether JE heterogeneously affects teenage pregnancy by civil status, number of children, and pre-intervention individual and household characteristics; and (iv) we explore the association of JE and teenage fatherhood