Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments

Corno, Lucia; Hildebrandt, Nicole; Voena, Alessandra

doi:10.3386/w23604

Cited by 88 publications

(153 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…In India, in rice-growing areas, a positive rainfall shock delays marriage for girls, whose labour productivity increases (Mbiti, 2008): this suggests that increasing women's productivity could have positive impact on age at marriage. A recent paper by Corno et al (2016) reasonably argues that the eect of economic shocks on age at marriage for girls is conditional on the underlying marriage payment system. Comparing sub-Saharan Africa where the brideprice payment prevails with India where the dowry system dominates, they nd that a negative shock (droughts) on household income drives parents to marry their daughters earlier than usual in Africa but later in India.…”

Section: Early Marriagementioning

confidence: 99%

Eradicating women-hurting customs: What role for social engineering?

Platteau¹,

Camilotti²,

Auriol

2017

WIDER Working Paper

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Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to succeed than more indirect approaches when it comes to suppress genderbiased customs. This implies discussing the main possible interaction frameworks leading to antiwomen equilibria, and deriving policy implications from the corresponding games. The theoretical arguments are illustrated by examples drawn from available empirical works, thus providing a reasoned survey of the literature.

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Section: Early Marriagementioning

confidence: 99%

Eradicating women-hurting customs: What role for social engineering?

Platteau¹,

Camilotti²,

Auriol

2017

WIDER Working Paper

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“…In data from Zimbabwe, Hoogeveen, Van der Klaauw and Van Lomwel (2011) find that the marriage rate for daughters is higher when households experience changes in their livestock, but not when aggregate rainfall is low. Hildebrandt (2015) and Corno, Hildebrandt and Voena (2016) study the impact of aggregate rainfall shocks on child marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa and India. They show that droughts have similar e↵ects on crop yields but opposite e↵ects on the early marriage hazard in the two regions: in Africa, they increase the hazard into early marriage, while in India, they decrease it.…”

Section: Child Marriages and Bride Price Paymentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…Each grid cell can be matched to DHS clusters. From historical data on rainfall, rainfall shocks can be identified and defined (Corno et al, 2017). The rainfall shocks need to be exogenous to potential confounders within a given location and year of birth of cohorts under analysis.…”

Section: Improving the Evidence Base On The Effects Of Humanitarian Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanitarian Crises and Adolescent Well‐being: Knowledge, Gaps, and Prospects

Cuesta

Leone

2019

Journal of Economic Surveys

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Adolescence constitutes the second and final window of human growth and a period of specific vulnerabilities, such as early pregnancy, early marriage, HIV infection, suicide, violence, alcohol, and drugs. Only a limited body of research investigates the effects of humanitarian crises on the human capital and well‐being of adolescents. The evidence focuses on the short‐term effects of conflict and, to a lesser extent, natural disasters on education, physical health, and nutrition, but not on mental health. Most analyses examine the situations of individuals exposed in utero and young childhood, but rarely during adolescence. Typically missing are robust empirical identification strategies and estimates on heterogeneous effects across age or gender. The lack of quality data and challenges in defining adolescence, establishing causality, or ensuring ethical research explain the knowledge gaps. Possible ways to expand the evidence base include mixing georeferenced data on individual location with georeferenced data on crises, sharpening quasi‐experimental analytical techniques, and reconsidering the current timing of demographic data collection, now spanning 4‐ or 5‐year intervals. The failure to make such adjustments will end by ignoring specific vulnerabilities among adolescents and render sustainable progress in well‐being globally, narrowing inequalities, and guaranteeing human rights to all more difficult to achieve.

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Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments

Cited by 88 publications

References 6 publications

Eradicating women-hurting customs: What role for social engineering?

Eradicating women-hurting customs: What role for social engineering?

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

Humanitarian Crises and Adolescent Well‐being: Knowledge, Gaps, and Prospects

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