When a Strike Strikes Twice: Massive Student Mobilizations, School Incapacitation Effects, and Teenage Pregnancy in Chile

Abstract:

We empirically study the impact of massive school’s absenteeism on teenage pregnancy. Exploiting variation in the timing of nationwide student strikes and the average intensity of school’s adherence to the student movement across Chilean municipalities in 2011, we identify an economically large short-run impact of temporary high schools’ shutdown on teenage pregnancy. Preliminary results show that municipalities experienced an increase of 3% in teenage pregnancies, which amounts to 826 pregnancies conceived by girls in high school age within a year. The spike in teenage pregnancies is higher at the moment of largest mobilizations and vanishes three quarters after the beginning of the students’ strikes which we interpret as evidence of an incapacitation effect, rather than a network or social interaction effect, as a key underlying mechanism for the causal relationship between students’ strikes and teenage pregnancies.

Pablo A. Celhay, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and M. Cristina Riquelme