We examine the causal e¤ect of women's age at marriage on prevalence of domestic violence using newly available household data from India. We employ an empirical strategy that utilizes variation in age at menarche to obtain exogenous variation in women's age at marriage. We …nd robust evidence that a one-year delay in women's marriage causes a significant decline in physical violence, although it has no impact on sexual or emotional violence. Further, we provide suggestive evidence that the e¤ect of women's marital age on physical violence arises because older brides, as compared to younger brides, are more educated and are married to more educated men. Overall, our …ndings underscore the importance of better enforcement of existing social policies that seek to delay marriages of women, as well as formulation of newer interventions, to reduce the prevalence of domestic violence in developing countries.
Wasting in children under-five is a form of acute malnutrition, a predictor of under-five child mortality and of increased risk of future episodes of stunting and/or wasting. In India, national estimates of wasting are high compared to international standards with one in five children found to be wasted. National surveys are complex logistical operations and most often not planned or implemented in a manner to control for seasonality. Collection of survey data across differing months across states introduces seasonal bias. Cross-sectional surveys are not designed to collect data on seasonality, thus special methods are needed to analyse the effect of data collection by month. We developed regression models to estimate the mean weight for height (WHZ), prevalence of wasting for every month of the year for an average year and an overall weighted survey estimates controlling for the socio-demographic variation of data collection across states and populations over time. National level analyses show the mean WHZ starts at its highest in January, falls to the lowest in June/August and returns towards peak at year end. The prevalence of wasting is lowest in January and doubles by June/August. After accounting for seasonal patterns in data collection across surveys, the trends are significantly different and indicate a stagnant period followed by a decline in wasting. To avoid biased estimates, direct comparisons of acute malnutrition across surveys should not be made unless seasonality bias is appropriately addressed in planning, implementation or analysis. Eliminating the seasonal variation in wasting would reduce the prevalence by half and provide guidance towards further reduction in acute malnutrition.
The labor market impacts of women's age at marriage have recently received signi…cant attention from social scientists. The focus of this literature, however, has been the developed world and almost nothing is known about how a delay in marriage a¤ects labor market prospects of women in developing countries. This paper addresses this gap in the existing literature by providing the …rst comprehensive assessment of the relationship between women's age at marriage and own as well as spousal labor market outcomes speci…cally in context of a developing country. Using nationally representative household data from India, we …nd evidence of positive e¤ects of women's age at marriage on their own and their spouses'labor market outcomes. To examine whether these e¤ects are causal or arise due to selection into marriage, we use an instrumental variables-based empirical strategy that utilizes variation in age at menarche to obtain exogenous variation in women's age at marriage. Our results indicate that the positive e¤ects of age at marriage of women on own as well spousal labor market outcomes are not causal and arise purely due to selection. The results are robust to addressing biases due to nonrandom selection of individuals into labor force. Our …ndings shed new light on theories of labor market in developing countries speci…cally through the lens of marriage.JEL: J12, J16, J22, J31, O12
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.