Published In

Economics Letters

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2023

Subjects

Abortion -- Government policy -- United States

Abstract

We examined the relative impact of the anticipated repeal of Roe v. Wade on the share of female applicants to universities in states where abortion was banned compared with universities in states where abortion remained legal. Using the Common Data Sets from 71 of the top 100 institutions in the United States spanning 27 states from academic years 2018–2022, we found that there was a nearly one percentage point relative decrease in the share of female undergraduate applicants to institutions in ban states compared with states in which abortion remained legal. This suggests that undergraduate applicants are sensitive to state reproductive health policies and that this may impact the demographic composition of colleges and the future labor pool of the affected states.

Rights

Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111379

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/40993

Included in

Economics Commons

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