Does education help combat early marriage? The effect of compulsory schooling laws in China

Yinhe Liang and Shuang Yu

Applied Economics, 2022, vol. 54, issue 55, 6361-6379

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between education and early marriage by exploiting the 1986 Compulsory Schooling Laws in China. We find that one additional year of schooling decreases the probability of marriage before age 18 by 1.7% points and increases the age at first marriage by 0.734 years. We examine the role of labour market outcomes, marriage traditions, assortative mating, and peer marriage behaviours. We also find evidence that education decreases fertility outcomes and affects the marriage outcomes of the next generation. This suggests that policies aimed at combating early marriage could start with improving children’s educational attainment.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2022.2061906 (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:taf:applec:v:54:y:2022:i:55:p:6361-6379

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2022.2061906

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().