The Impact of Home Pregnancy Testing on Fertility and Women's Later-Life Outcomes

Job Market Paper  [PDF]

Home pregnancy tests give early fertility information and help women make timely family-planning decisions. This paper studies how the introduction of home pregnancy tests in the US in 1977 impacted fertility, early prenatal care, and later-life outcomes. Using county-level drugstore accessibility to approximate test availability, I document significant trend breaks in fertility rates after 1977 among women who had access to drugstores. The effects are the strongest for those aged 15–29 and concentrated among those with access to abortion services. In the long run, women exposed to home pregnancy tests were more likely to delay childbirth, participate in the labor force, and never marry; these women were also less likely to divorce.

The Benefits of Prenatal Care: Evidence from the SARS Epidemic in Taiwan 

with Shin-Yi Chou, Hsien-Ming Lien 

This paper overcomes the challenge of estimating the benefits of prenatal care by exploring a 20% reduction in prenatal care use during the 2003 SARS epidemic in Taiwan. Adopting social learning effects in response to the widespread panic, we instrument a mother's reduction in prenatal visits with the change in average visits among their peer groups. Using administrative data, we find that prenatal care significantly lowered the likelihood of low birth weight, preterm birth, and neonatal and infant mortality. When stratifying samples by parity, the effects on mortality only persist among the firstborn, suggesting that information is especially important for first-time mothers. However, we find no impact on maternal complications during delivery.