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

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