Publications
- Early Marriage and Female Schooling in Bangladesh
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- by Field, Erica M.; Ambrus, Attila
- This paper provides empirical evidence of the influence of adolescent marriage opportunities
on female schooling attainment and gives predictions of the impact of imposing universal age-of-consent
laws. Using data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the commonly cited hypotheses that women attain
less schooling as a result of marrying young. We isolate the causal effect of marriage timing by exploiting
variation in the timing of menarche as an instrumental variable for age of first marriage. Our results
indicate that marriage age matters: Each additional year that marriage is delayed is associated with 0.30
additional years of schooling and 6.5% higher probability of literacy. Delayed marriage is also associated
with a significant increase in use of preventive health care services, some of which appears to be
independent of the change in schooling, indicating separate “age effects” of delaying marriage. In the
context of competitive marriage markets we show that the above results can be used to obtain estimates of
the change in equilibrium female education that would arise from introducing a minimum legal age of
marriage. The resulting analysis implies that, under reasonable assumptions, enforcing universal age of
consent laws would have a strong positive impact on female schooling.
- Publication Type: WCFIA Working Paper
- Published Date: November 2006
- Field of Interest: Global Issues
- Field, Erica, and Attila Ambrus. "Early Marriage and Female Schooling in Bangladesh." Working Paper 2008-0030, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, November 2005.
