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Early Teen Marriage and Future Poverty

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Author Info
Gordon B. Dahl
Abstract

Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to pre-existing differences or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, this paper uses an instrumental variables approach which takes advantage of variation in state laws regulating the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The baseline IV estimate indicates that a woman who marries young is 28 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 10 percentage points more likely to be poor. The IV results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including LIML estimation. In comparison, standard OLS estimates are extremely sensitive to how the data is aggregated, particularly for the early marriage variable.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 11328.

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Date of creation: May 2005
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11328

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J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor

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