This article investigates whether increasing mandatory educational attainment through compulsory
schooling legislation encourages women to delay childbearing. We use variation induced by changes
in compulsory schooling laws in both the US and Norway to estimate the effect in two very different
institutional environments. We find evidence that increased compulsory schooling does in fact
reduce the incidence of teenage childbearing in both the US and Norway, and these estimates are
quite robust to various specification checks. These results suggest that legislation aimed at improving
educational outcomes may have spillover effects onto the fertility decisions of teenagers.