Age at marriage and marital stability: evidence from China

Jorge García-Hombrados and Berkay Özcan ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jorge Garcia Hombrados

No WP-2022-014, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: Many studies showed that marrying younger is associated with a higher risk of divorce. We investigate the causal effect of marrying at an earlier age on women’s divorce risk. We exploit the introduction of the 1981 reform in China, which facilitated legal marriage for urban women younger than 25 years old, using the Chinese Census data. We show that the reform generated a kink in the mean age at marriage for women, which we use in a fuzzy regression kink design (RKD) to assess the causal effect of marrying younger on the probability of divorce. First, we confirm in our data the existence of a negative (in fact, a U-shaped) association between age at marriage and divorce, as commonly observed in previous studies from the USA. Then, we show that this association disappears in our analyses based on RKD. This finding suggests that the well-documented association between early marriage and divorce is in fact attributable to unobservable factors driving both marriage timing and the likelihood of divorce. We discuss the implications. Keywords: Age at marriage, divorce, legal age of marriage, China. JEL codes: J12.

Keywords: China; age at marriage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-cna
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Related works:
Journal Article: Age at marriage and marital stability: evidence from China (2024)
Working Paper: Age at marriage and marital stability: evidence from China (2023)
Working Paper: Age at marriage and marital stability: Evidence from China (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2022-014

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2022-014

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