The Effects of Teenage Childbearing on Adult Soft Skills Development.

Research examining impacts of teenage childbearing on economic and social outcomes has focused on completed schooling and labor force outcomes. In this paper, we examine outcomes that have remained largely unexplored, soft-skills and personality. We use Add Health data to construct relevant controls for teenage mothers and explore a set of measures that proxy for what is usually deemed in economics as "non-cognitive" or "soft-skill" traits. We find that teenage childbearing increases impulsivity, a trait that has been found to have negative effects on a large set of outcomes and has a negative effect on other personality traits perceived as positive, such as openness to experiences. Our results remain consistent through a set of robustness checks, and we interpret our findings to suggest that adolescence may be a sensitive period for the development of soft skills and that childbearing may interrupt this process.