Adverse shocks, household expenditure and child marriage: evidence from India and Vietnam

Abstract

Child marriage is associated with negative outcomes in regard to education, health and economic empowerment in later life. While the consequences of child marriage have been studied extensively, there has been limited discussion on the drivers of child marriage. This paper examines the impact of adverse shocks on child marriage. We use a sample of 886 girls between 12 and 18 years of age from India and Vietnam involved in the Young Lives project. The potential endogeneity problem is addressed by using rainfall deviation as the instrument. We find that in Vietnam, where bride price payment is a common practice in the event of expenditure reduction resulting from adverse shocks, a household ma..