TY  - JOUR
AU  - Dahl,Gordon B.
TI  - Early Teen Marriage and Future Poverty
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11328
PY  - 2005
Y2  - May 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11328
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11328.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Gordon Dahl
Department of Economics
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #0508
La Jolla, CA 92093-0508
Tel: 858-822-0644
E-Mail: gdahl@ucsd.edu
AB  - 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 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 LIML estimation and a control function approach.  While grouped 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.
ER  -