Covid-19 and Women's Age at Marriage: New Evidence from India

25 Pages Posted: 6 Dec 2022

See all articles by Deepshikha Batheja

Deepshikha Batheja

One Health Trust

Arindam Nandi

The Population Council

Abhik Banerji

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Amit Summan

Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy

Ramanan Laxminarayan

One Health Trust

Date Written: October 29, 2022

Abstract

A rich literature has documented the relationship between age at marriage and girls’ health and educational outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has been hypothesized to have influenced household decision making on the age of marriage. On the one hand, COVID-19 may have increased the age at marriage if lockdown policies and negative income shocks to families placed a burden on household wealth and the ability to pay for weddings. On the other hand, the pandemic could have decreased the age of marriage during the pandemic due to school closures that kept girls out of school, parental deaths that then encouraged families to expedite weddings, and lower wedding costs because of government mandates to have smaller weddings. Using data from the National Family Health Survey of 2019-2021 of India (NFHS-5), we explore how COVID-19 impacted age at marriage for women using household and district fixed effects models and propensity-score matching methods. Contingent on the model and specification, we find a significant increase in age at marriage for women who got married after the onset of the pandemic compared to those married before the pandemic, by 0.76 to 3.67 years, approximately a 3.6% to 19.5% increase from pre-COVID-19 levels.

Keywords: COVID-19, age of marriage, women’s status, India

JEL Classification: J11, J12, J16

Suggested Citation

Batheja, Deepshikha and Nandi, Arindam and Banerji, Abhik and Summan, Amit and Laxminarayan, Ramanan, Covid-19 and Women's Age at Marriage: New Evidence from India (October 29, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4261406 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4261406

Deepshikha Batheja (Contact Author)

One Health Trust ( email )

Obeya Pulse, First Floor, 7/1, Halasur Road
Bengaluru, 560102
India

Arindam Nandi

The Population Council ( email )

Abhik Banerji

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Amit Summan

Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy ( email )

1616 P St NW
Suite 600
Washington DC, DC 20036
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://www.amit-summan.com/

Ramanan Laxminarayan

One Health Trust ( email )

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