 Is Child Marriage an Unintended Consequence of a Ban on Sex-Selective Abortion?Doireann O'Brien ()
No tep0925, Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department Abstract: The introduction of prenatal sex-detection technologies has led to a surge in the abortion of female foetuses in South and East Asia. Bans on sex-selection are typically introduced to combat this practice, but they may have unintended consequences for girls due to persistent norms of son preference. This paper identifies an increase in child marriage as one such consequence in the context of India. I exploit a natural experiment created by Maharashtra's implementation of a ban on sex-selection while it remained legal in neighbouring states. I find that treated girls born after the policy’s implementation were significantly more likely to be married as children. This effect is strongest among scheduled tribe and caste communities, who face greater barriers to evading the ban. I find little evidence for a marriage-squeeze channel. A plausible mechanism is that child marriage is used as an alternative coping strategy to abortion, against the costliness of raising daughters. Keywords: Sex-selective abortion; Child marriage; Gender norms; Son Preference; Dowry (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tcd:tcduee:tep0925 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Economic Papers from Trinity College Dublin, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.