Adolescent Brides and Grooms' Education: Theory and Evidence

Sylvain Dessy, Setou Diarra, Roland Pongou, Setou Diarra and Roland Pongou

Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques

Abstract: Public policy addressing the harmful practice of adolescent marriage tends to leave out men, as prospective grooms. Using micro-level data from Nigeria in combination with plausible instrumental variables, we find that a male's education significantly decreases the likelihood that he marries an adolescent girl. We show that this negative relationship is not a mere mechanical effect reflecting the endogeneity between schooling and marriage-timing decisions, and that it is stronger where patriarchal gender norms are weaker. We develop a model that explains this causal effect as resulting from the complementarity between father's and mother's education in the production of child quality.

Keywords: Adolescent Marriage; Groom Education; Quantity-Quality Trade-off (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C13 C14 J12 J13 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1610

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