Child Marriage, Legal Regimes, and Life Outcomes

Sammanfattning

This paper studies how minimum-marriage-age laws shape women's outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We develop a three-stage model linking legal enforcement, pre-market educational investment, marriage-market selection, and intra-household bargaining. In the model, stricter enforcement delays marriage, later marriage increases the human capital women bring into marriage, and these entry conditions affect household outcomes through selection and bargaining. We test the model using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design across eleven African border pairs, comparing women who live near the same international border but face different legal regimes. Women on the stricter side of the border complete 0.27 additional education levels, have their first birth 0.84 years later, have 0.29 fewer children, and are 3.2 percentage points more likely to work in white-collar employment. Years of education also increase by 0.69 years, although this estimate is sensitive to spatial correction of standard errors. Taken together, the results suggest that minimum-marriage-age laws affect women's lives not only by delaying marriage directly, but also by changing pre-marital investment and the conditions under which women enter household bargaining.