Sex is a Substitute for School?

That's what Daniel Rees and Joe Sabia find anyway. From the abstract

"A number of studies have shown that teenagers who abstain from sex are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their sexually active peers. However, it is unclear whether this association represents a causal relationship or can be explained by unmeasured heterogeneity. This study employs a variety of econometric techniques to distinguish between these hypotheses using data on females from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our results provide evidence that delaying first intercourse leads to an increased likelihood of graduating high school. The avoidance of teen pregnancies can explain approximately one third of this effect. Controlling for teen pregnancies, psychological/emotional factors, and academicestimated effect by more than 50 percent.

This quote from the first page helps explain a possible reason for this finding. “When greater energy and interest are invested in sexual activity, the drive for academic performance is likely to diminish.” (Rector and Johnson 2005, p. 20). In other words, maybe it's a substitution effect caused by a simple reallocation of time? When you're spending all that time trying to get laid, what else would you have done? After all, it's not easy to have sex in high school - it requires significant planning, woo'ing, money, etc. And that time is all coming from somewhere. Maybe it is coming from your schooling.

Update: They focus just on females, not males. Secondly, they find that waiting til age 18 to have sex has a large reduction in the probability of dropping out, and that is mainly because abstinence prevents pregnancy, and teen pregnancy is one of the most significant reasons for dropping out for a girl. Not quite the story I had in mind, but I guess it's interesting. Actually, it's kind of less interesting than before. I like my time allocation story much better.