Abstract
Child marriage is associated with negative outcomes in regard to education, health and economic empowerment in later life. While the consequences of child marriage have been studied extensively, there has been limited discussion on the drivers of child marriage. This paper examines the impact of adverse shocks on child marriage. We use a sample of 886 girls between 12 and 18 years of age from India and Vietnam involved in the Young Lives project. The potential endogeneity problem is addressed by using rainfall deviation as the instrument. We find that in Vietnam, where bride price payment is a common practice in the event of expenditure reduction resulting from adverse shocks, a household may consider marrying off their daughter as a possible coping strategy. In contrast, in India where dowry payments are common, shocks may reduce the probability of child marriage, possibly, because a girl’s family is unable to meet the dowry requirements. These findings are robust to alternative ways of measuring child marriage, expenditure and rainfall deviation. We recommend that policies designed to reduce child marriage are considered in the context of cultural and social norms.
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Notes
Refer to Sect. 2 for a detailed literature review on consequences and determinants of child marriage.
Refer to Sect. 3 for a detailed description of the Young Lives project.
According to India’s Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006, the legal age for marriage is 18 years for women and 21 years for men.
The concept of sentinel sites come from health surveillance studies and is a form of purposive sampling where the site, or ‘cluster’, is deemed to represent a certain type of population, and is expected to reflect trends affecting those particular people or areas.
For more details about the sampling design, see Young Lives Project (2011).
This is consistent with the literature showing that girls are often considered ready for marriage at the onset of puberty, which usually occurs in the early teenage years (Field and Ambrus 2008).
We do not use information from the first round, because no marriage is observed before 12 years of age. For children who experience marriage between 15 and 18 years of age (in which case the dependent variable equals 1), we could construct explanatory variables using information from the third round. For children who experience marriage before 15 years of age (in which case the dependent variable equals 1), we could construct explanatory variables using information from the second round. Consistent with the literature, we define child marriage as marriage under 18 years of age and thus do not distinguish these two cases. Nevertheless, we conduct such investigations in a further extension in Sect. 5.
Area refers to province and district in Vietnam and India, respectively.
The Young Lives project collects information on whether households experienced natural disasters in the last 4 years since the interview date. However, our analysis did not employ this self-reported measure, because it is likely to be endogenous and vary across households. Such self-reported data could correlate with unobserved personality traits such as pessimism that also determine the likelihood of child marriage, thus introducing potential endogeneity bias from a different source. That said, our results remain consistent should we employ this addition instrument variable.
Our sample shows that in Vietnam, 76% and 10% of the household harvest rice and maize as main crop; whereas in India, 50%, 30% and 10% harvest rice, wheat and pulses as main crop. We construct dummies for these crops and interact with main variable. However, consistent with Panel A in Table 7, we did not find evidence of heterogeneity. To conserve space, we do not report these results.
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The authors are thankful to Simon Feeny and Alberto Posso for their helpful comments on early version of this paper. The authors are also thankful to anonymous reviewer and associate editor for their constructive comments. All errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the authors.
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Trinh, TA., Zhang, Q. Adverse shocks, household expenditure and child marriage: evidence from India and Vietnam. Empir Econ 61, 1617–1639 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01907-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01907-2