Are age-of-marriage laws enforced? Evidence from developing countries

Matthew Collin and Theodore Talbot

Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 160, issue C

Abstract: Child marriage is associated with negative outcomes for women and girls. Many countries have raised the legal age of marriage, but the incidence of early marriage remains high. We propose a simple test for whether laws are effective in deterring early marriage and apply it to data from both the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) covering over 100 countries using statistical tests derived from the regression discontinuity literature. By this measure, many countries are not enforcing the laws on their books, and enforcement may be not be improving over time. We argue that survey data provides a simple way to test if laws are being enforced and are binding, and interpret our results to show that legal change needs to be accompanied by better enforcement and greater monitoring to be effective.

Keywords: Child marriage; Discontinuity tests; Rule of law; Legal effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822000967
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:160:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822000967

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102950

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().