Secondary schools and teenage childbearing : evidence from the school expansion in Brazilian municipalities

This article investigates the effect of increasing secondary education opportunities on teenage fertility in Brazil. We construct a novel dataset to exploit variation from a 57% increase in secondary schools across 4,884 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2009. We find that an increase of one school per 100 females reduces a cohort’s teenage birthrate by between 0.250 and 0.563 births per 100, or a reduction of one birth for roughly every 50 to 100 students who enroll in secondary education.