Do Age-of-Marriage Laws Work? Evidence from a Large Sample of Developing Countries

50 Pages Posted: 4 Aug 2017

See all articles by Matthew Collin

Matthew Collin

University of Oxford

Theodore Talbot

Center for Global Development

Date Written: June 22, 2017

Abstract

Child marriage is associated with bad outcomes for women and girls. Although many countries have raised the legal age of marriage to deter this practice, the incidence of early marriage remains stubbornly high. We develop a simple model to explain how enforcing minimum age-of-marriage laws creates differences in the share of women getting married at the legal cut-off. We formally test for these discontinuities using multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in over 60 countries by applying statistical tests derived from the regression discontinuity literature. By this measure, most countries are not enforcing the laws on their books and enforcement is not getting better over time. Separately, we demonstrate that various measures of age-of-marriage discontinuities are systematically related to with existing, widely-accepted measures of rule-of-law and government effectiveness. A key contribution is therefore a simple, tractable way to monitor legal enforcement using survey data. We conclude by arguing that better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring in to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls.

Keywords: Child Marriage, Discontinuity Tests, Rule of Law, Legal Effectiveness

JEL Classification: J12, K42

Suggested Citation

Collin, Matthew and Talbot, Theodore, Do Age-of-Marriage Laws Work? Evidence from a Large Sample of Developing Countries (June 22, 2017). Center for Global Development Working Paper No. 458, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3013388 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3013388

Matthew Collin (Contact Author)

University of Oxford ( email )

Mansfield Road
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 4AU
United Kingdom

Theodore Talbot

Center for Global Development ( email )

2055 L St. NW
5th floor
Washington, DC 20036
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
219
Abstract Views
764
Rank
267,069
PlumX Metrics