But the show — in part by educating teenagers about the difficulty of having a child, in part by stressing the consequences of unprotected sex and in part by fostering a conversation about contraceptives and pregnancy — seems to have reduced the rate of teenage births, according to the economic analysis by Melissa S. Kearney, the director of the Hamilton Project, a research group in Washington, and Phillip B. Levine of Wellesley College.

Ms. Kearney and Mr. Levine examined birth records and Nielsen television ratings, finding that the rate of teenage pregnancy declined faster in areas where teenagers were watching more MTV programming — not only the “16 and Pregnant” series — than in areas where they did not. The study focuses on the period after “16 and Pregnant” was introduced in 2009 and accounts for the fact that teenagers who tuned in to the show might have been at higher risk of having a child to begin with.

“The assumption we’re making is that there’s no reason to think that places where more people are watching more MTV in June 2009, would start seeing an excess rate of decline in the teen birthrate, but for the change in what they were watching,” Mr. Levine said.

Researchers who had reviewed the paper said that its conclusions, as striking as they were, seemed sound, while stressing that every study has limitations. For example, there is no way to know whether individual viewers of the program changed their behavior by avoiding unprotected sex, but the researchers were able to correlate higher viewership over all with reduced birthrates.

“It’s a substantial and an important finding,” said Diane Schanzenbach of Northwestern University. “If they told us this cut the rate in half, I wouldn’t believe it,” she added.

The study also explores how “16 and Pregnant” might have influenced teenagers’ behavior. For example, the two economists showed that social-media postings about contraception and Internet searches on the topic spiked sharply whenever the show was being broadcast.

Despite the criticism of the program and the mothers it depicts, teenagers who have seen it said it helped demonstrate how hard being a young parent could be, and began a conversation about how a teenager might end up in that circumstance.