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Early teen marriage and future poverty - PubMed

Early teen marriage and future poverty

Gordon B Dahl. Demography. 2010 Aug.

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 preexisting differences, or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, in this article, I use an instrumental variables (IV) approach that 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 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. While grouped ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates for the early teen marriage variable are also large, OLS estimates based on individual-level data are small, consistent with a large amount of measurement error

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Proportion of Women Marrying Young and Women’s Median Age at First Marriage Notes: Data on the fraction of teenage marriages are from the author’s tabulations of U.S. census data. All other data series are from various tables in Carter et al. (2006). Vertical lines denote the time period analyzed in this article (1935–1969).

Figure 2
Figure 2

Marriage, Divorce, and Fertility Rates Over Time Notes: Data are from various tables in Carter et al. (2006). Vertical lines denote the time period analyzed in this article (1935–1969).

Figure 3
Figure 3

The Timing of Marriages for Women by Type of State Marriage Law, 1968 and 1969 Vital Statistics Marriage Certificate Data Notes: Data were collected from marriage certificates by the National Center for Health Statistics. Marriage rates are grouped in two-month intervals. The sample is restricted to women who married for the first time, who married between the ages of 14 and 16, and who were residents of and got married in a state that is in a marriage-reporting area (MRA) and has information on marriage laws. The marriage certificate data include all records for small states and a random sample for larger states; the probabilities in the figure are weighted (unweighted probabilites are very similar). The 27 states included in this figure have the following minimum marriage age with parental consent in 1968 and 1969 for women: 13 years in New Hampshire (included with the 14-year age minimum states in the first graph); 14 years in Alabama, New York, Utah; 15 years in Mississippi, Missouri, Oregon; and 16 years in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

Figure 3
Figure 3

The Timing of Marriages for Women by Type of State Marriage Law, 1968 and 1969 Vital Statistics Marriage Certificate Data Notes: Data were collected from marriage certificates by the National Center for Health Statistics. Marriage rates are grouped in two-month intervals. The sample is restricted to women who married for the first time, who married between the ages of 14 and 16, and who were residents of and got married in a state that is in a marriage-reporting area (MRA) and has information on marriage laws. The marriage certificate data include all records for small states and a random sample for larger states; the probabilities in the figure are weighted (unweighted probabilites are very similar). The 27 states included in this figure have the following minimum marriage age with parental consent in 1968 and 1969 for women: 13 years in New Hampshire (included with the 14-year age minimum states in the first graph); 14 years in Alabama, New York, Utah; 15 years in Mississippi, Missouri, Oregon; and 16 years in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

Figure 3
Figure 3

The Timing of Marriages for Women by Type of State Marriage Law, 1968 and 1969 Vital Statistics Marriage Certificate Data Notes: Data were collected from marriage certificates by the National Center for Health Statistics. Marriage rates are grouped in two-month intervals. The sample is restricted to women who married for the first time, who married between the ages of 14 and 16, and who were residents of and got married in a state that is in a marriage-reporting area (MRA) and has information on marriage laws. The marriage certificate data include all records for small states and a random sample for larger states; the probabilities in the figure are weighted (unweighted probabilites are very similar). The 27 states included in this figure have the following minimum marriage age with parental consent in 1968 and 1969 for women: 13 years in New Hampshire (included with the 14-year age minimum states in the first graph); 14 years in Alabama, New York, Utah; 15 years in Mississippi, Missouri, Oregon; and 16 years in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

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