Adult mortality and children's transition into marriage

Beegle, Kathleen; Krutikova, Sonya

doi:10.4054/demres.2008.19.42

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…In stark contrast, adverse income shocks do not seem to influence the likelihood of child marriages for boys: almost all the coe cients on rainfall shocks are negative but not statistically significant. This gender asymmetry is consistent with evidence from the same region in Tanzania showing that parental death a↵ects the timing of marriage of girls, but not of boys (Beegle and Krutikova, 2007). In the appendix, table A2, we report the estimated coe cients for equation (1) showing the e↵ect of negative income shocks separately for each year in the respondent's life cycle.…”

Section: Child Marriages and Income Shockssupporting

confidence: 67%

Selling daughters: age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition

Corno¹,

Voena²

2016

Working Paper Series

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When markets are incomplete, cultural norms may play an important role in shaping economic behavior. In this paper, we explore whether income shocks increase the probability of child marriages in societies that engage in bride price payments -transfers from the groom to the bride's parents at marriage. We develop a simple model in which households are exposed to income volatility and have no access to credit markets. If a daughter marries, the household obtains a bride price and has fewer members to support. In this framework, girls have a higher probability of marrying early when their parents have higher marginal utility of consumption because of adverse income shocks. We test the prediction of the model by exploiting variation in rainfall shocks over a woman's life cycle, using a survey dataset from rural Tanzania. We find that adverse shocks during teenage years increase the probability of early marriages and early fertility among women.⇤ We thank Jérôme Adda, Marcella Alsan, Natalie Bau, Caterina Gennaioli, Veronica Guerrieri, Eliana La Ferrara, Costas Meghir, Claudia Olivetti, Michèle Tertilt, Marcos Vera-Hernandez and participants at the workshops at COSME, Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, SED meetings,"Families and the Macroeconomy" in Mannheim, EDePo, and AEA meetings, and at seminars at Stockholm School of Economics, Bocconi and Queen Mary for helpful comments. We are grateful to Helene Bie Lilleør and Sofya Krutikova for useful discussion on the Kagera Health Development Survey and to Kalle Hirvonen for the clarification regarding weather data. Simone Lenzu and Jorge Rodriguez provided outstanding research assistance. This research was partly funded by a Research Grant from the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.† Queen Mary, University of London and IFS. Email: l.corno@qmul.ac.uk ‡ The University of Chicago and NBER. Email: avoena@uchicago.edu. 1The relationship is stronger in villages where bride price payments are typically higher. We use these empirical results to estimate the parameters of our model and isolate the role of the bride price custom for consumption smoothing. In counterfactual exercises, we show that parents heavily rely on child marriages and bride price payments to smooth consumption. Without credit markets, bans on these practices are costly for a daughter's parents. However, ensuring access to credit limits parents' cost, making bans more likely to succeed.

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Section: Child Marriages and Income Shockssupporting

confidence: 67%

Selling daughters: age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition

Corno¹,

Voena²

2016

Working Paper Series

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“…Practices of bridewealth in the region, or payments from a groom's family to a bride's family, can incentivize families to marry daughters early to reduce household costs and increase assets (Fenn et al 2015). Though the evidence comes from other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, excess primeage adult mortality, whether from AIDS or other causes, also perpetuates early marriage (Beegle and Krutikova 2008;Ueyama and Yamauchi 2009).…”

Section: Childbearing Initiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Untold Story of 50 Years of Adolescent Fertility in West Africa: A Cohort Perspective on the Quantum, Timing, and Spacing of Adolescent Childbearing

Garbett¹,

Perelli‐Harris²,

Neal³

2021

Population & Development Rev

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Although recent studies examine overall fertility trends in West Africa, few using advanced demographic techniques focus on adolescents. This study explores long-term patterns of adolescent childbearing in 12 West African countries using 51 Demographic and Health Surveys covering birth cohorts that span 54 years (1940-1994). We employ classic demographic measures as well as disaggregation by early-(10-14 years old), middle-(15-17), and late adolescence (18-19). Cohort-based estimates of total adolescent births, parity progression ratios, and rapid repeat birth probabilities reveal little change over time. Most women begin childbearing in adolescence, the progression to additional adolescent births remains common, and the incidence of rapid repeat births is high. In recent cohorts, women exit adolescence with an average of between 0.4 (Ghana) to 1.3 (Niger) births. Contrary to common assumptions, it is women commencing motherhood in early-and middle-, not later adolescence, who account for most West African adolescent fertility.

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“…Children who had lost a parent during the hiatus were compared with those whose parents survived. Female orphans were more likely to be married (Beegle and Krustikova 2008), orphans had completed one year less of schooling, and they were 2 cm shorter than non-orphans (Beegle et al 2010). Because height is largely determined by the time a child is age 4 or 5 (Martorell and Habicht 1986), the differences in height at follow-up likely reflect preexisting differences between children who subsequently lost a parent and those who did not.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Parental Death on Child Well-being: Evidence From the Indian Ocean Tsunami

Gail

Frankenberg

Suriastini³

et al. 2014

Demography

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Identifying the impact of parental death on the well-being of children is complicated because parental death is likely to be correlated with other, unobserved factors that affect child well-being. Population-representative longitudinal data collected in Aceh, Indonesia, before and after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are used to identify the impact of parental deaths on the well-being of children aged 9-17 at the time of the tsunami. Exploiting the unanticipated nature of parental death resulting from the tsunami in combination with measuring well-being of the same children before and after the tsunami, models that include child fixed effects are estimated to isolate the causal effect of parental death. Comparisons are drawn between children who lost one or both parents and children whose parents survived. Shorter-term impacts on school attendance and time allocation one year after the tsunami are examined, as well as longer-term impacts on education trajectories and marriage. Shorter-and longer-term impacts are not the same. Five years after the tsunami, there are substantial deleterious impacts of the tsunami on older boys and girls, whereas the effects on younger children are more muted.

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Adult mortality and children's transition into marriage

Cited by 17 publications

References 10 publications

Selling daughters: age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition

Selling daughters: age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition

The Untold Story of 50 Years of Adolescent Fertility in West Africa: A Cohort Perspective on the Quantum, Timing, and Spacing of Adolescent Childbearing

The Impact of Parental Death on Child Well-being: Evidence From the Indian Ocean Tsunami

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