The Effect of Education on Teen Fertility: Evidence from the Abolition of School Fees in Ethiopia

We investigate the causal effect of a woman’s years of schooling on giving birth while a teenager using a major educational policy change in Ethiopia in 1994 that abolished school fees. We find that the policy change was associated with a jump in school attendance with women who reached school starting age just after the policy was introduced achieving around 1.3 years of additional education, on average, compared to women who just missed the policy. Using a regression discontinuity approach we find that each additional year of schooling due to the policy lowers the probability of giving birth before age twenty by about 6 percentage points (from a baseline of about 54%). This implies that completing lower primary school (4 years of schooling) reduces the probability of a teenage birth by 0.24. We show that the decline in teen fertility with schooling can be explained by a decline of similar magnitude in the probability that the more educated women are married before age twenty, though there is a somewhat lower decline in the number of educated women reporting that their age at first sex is before age twenty.