Child marriage: using the Indonesian family life survey to examine the lives of women and men who married at an early age

Lisa Cameron, Diana Contreras Suarez and Susan Wieczkiewicz
Additional contact information
Susan Wieczkiewicz: University of Melbourne

Review of Economics of the Household, 2023, vol. 21, issue 3, No 1, 725-756

Abstract: Abstract An understanding of the experiences of men and women who marry before adulthood is important in motivating social change. Using fixed effects estimation (the inclusion of geographic fixed effects at diminishing levels of aggregation and sister fixed effects where possible) on panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we follow the lives of a sample of 40,800 women and men for up to two decades and examine a wide range of factors associated with child marriage. We examine the lives of both girls and boys who marry early, and the differential experience of girls marrying older men versus young boys. Child marriage is found to be associated with lesser educational attainment, lower earnings and less say in household decision-making, for both men and women. Women are less likely to have a medically-supervised birth and their children are more likely to die, be stunted and perform worse on cognitive tests. Negative factors are mostly exacerbated when young girls marry similarly underage men.

Keywords: Child marriage; Gender; Economic development; Indonesia; O15; J12; J16; I15; I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-022-09616-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:reveho:v:21:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s11150-022-09616-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-022-09616-8

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().