Stéphane Mechoulan (Dalhousie University)

Abortion Legalization and the Fabric of American College Students

Abstract. I investigate the consequences of abortion legalization on the sociodemographic characteristics of college students using cross sectional data from the Freshman Survey. I supplement two-way fixed effects and event study designs with a recently proposed difference-in-difference estimator which, in settings with staggered policy adoption, accounts for treatment effect heterogeneity across groups and dynamic treatment effects that vary over time. Abortion legalization increased the proportion of privileged
students, particularly in private, non-selective colleges, at the expense of students from modest backgrounds. No effect on the gender or the religious composition of students emerges.