How MTV’s 16 and Pregnant Impacts U.S. Teen Birth Rates

Could the wildly popular, yet controversial, MTV series 16 and Pregnant be contributing to a decline in teen births? In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Hamilton Project director Melissa S. Kearney and co-author Philip S. Levine set out to answer this question and other speculations about the series’ effect on teen births.

This week, the NBER released Kearney and Levine’s thought provoking working paper, “Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing.”

Could the wildly popular, yet controversial, MTV series 16 and Pregnant be contributing to a decline in teen births? In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Hamilton Project director Melissa S. Kearney and co-author Philip S. Levine set out to answer this question and other speculations about the series’ effect on teen births.

This week, the NBER released Kearney and Levine’s thought provoking working paper, “Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing.” Using data from Google Trends and Twitter to document changes in searches and tweets resulting from the show, Nielsen ratings data to capture geographic variation in viewership, and Vital Statistics birth data to measure changes in teen birth rates Kearney and Levine found that 16 and Pregnant “ultimately led to a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following its introduction. This accounts for around one-third of the overall decline in teen births in the United States during that period.”

Since yesterday’s release of the working paper, Kearney and Levine’s findings have been featured by the New York Times, NPR and several other widespread news sources. Kearney and Levine also blog about their work on The Huffington Post.

To read the full working paper on NBER’s website, click here >>