{"id":700,"date":"2026-05-01T08:19:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T08:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/05\/01\/the-collapse-of-teen-fertility-in-the-digital-era-marginal-revolution\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T08:19:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T08:19:45","slug":"the-collapse-of-teen-fertility-in-the-digital-era-marginal-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/05\/01\/the-collapse-of-teen-fertility-in-the-digital-era-marginal-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"The collapse of teen fertility in the digital era &#8211; Marginal REVOLUTION"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one. Within the United States, terrainruggedness variation in broadband and 4G coverage identifies a causal effect on teen fertility, and time-use diaries show in-person socializing among teens roughly halving while digital leisure roughly tripled. A parallel design for England and Wales recovers the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions, ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories. The model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior. The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2026\/04\/the-collapse-of-teen-fertility-in-the-digital-era.html\">marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2026\/04\/the-collapse-of-teen-fertility-in-the-digital-era.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[123,21,124,122],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-sex","tag-smartphones","tag-suicide","tag-teens"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}