10/ Please help share our extended replication to correct the record on this misleading policy evaluation!

Full replication text here: www.econstor.eu/handle/10419...

We had a great experience at the JoE, extremely supportive editor and very constructive comments from referees: so happy for the paper to be published in such a fantastic journal. Working on this topic has been eye-opening: do not have a lot of reliable data surrounding this very important issue.

Another thing to note: In Sweden contraception is widely available and low cost, but still a relatively high abortion rate (while much lower teen pregnancy rate) —> we might never eradicate all abortions, even in an ‘ideal’ environment.

Lindo and Pineda-Torres, 2021; Miller et al., 2020a; 2020b).  In summary, restrictive abortion policies are unlikely to improve women's well-being.

Is this an important result: we think yes! Mental health concerns shouldn't be used to justify abortion restrictions. Tighter policies may worsen stigma & unintended consequences (Biggs et al., 2020). Moreover, restricting abortion leads to other adverse economic impacts (Felkey and Lybecker, 2018;

We use the grouped fixed-effect estimator by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) to control for time-varying heterogeneity. Cannot use did approaches —> parallel-trends absolutely do not hold, all trend no treatment.

The paper is joint with @bsiflinger.bsky.social! A quick run-down of the main result: After controlling for time-varying heterogeneity, effects of an unplanned pregnancy followed by an abortion —> no effect on a woman’s mental health.