Early teen marriage and future poverty

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.Historically, individuals were allowed to enter into a marriage contract at a very young age. In Ancient Rome, the appropriate minimum age was regarded as 14 for males and 12 for females. When Rome became Christianized, these age minimums were adopted into the ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church. This canon law governed most marriages in Western Europe until the Reformation. When England broke away from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church carried with it the same minimum age requirements for the prospective bride and groom. The minimum age requirements of 12 and 14 were eventually written into English civil law. By default, these provisions became the minimum marriage ages in colonial America. These common laws inherited from the British remained in force in America unless a specific state law was enacted to replace them (see “Marriage Law,” Encyclopædia Britannica 2005; http://www.britannica.com).While Roman, Catholic, English, and early American law may have allowed marriage at 12 for girls and 14 for boys, many questioned the advisability of such early unions. Researchers and policymakers around the turn of the twentieth century recognized that teens may be especially ill-prepared to assume the familial responsibilities and financial pressures associated with marriage.¹ As a result of the changing economic and social landscape of the United States, in the latter part of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, individual states began to slowly raise the minimum legal age at which individuals were allowed to marry. In the United States, as in most developed countries, age restrictions have been revised upward so that they are now between 15 and 21 years of age.During this same time period, dramatic changes were also occurring in the educational system of the United States (see Goldin 1998, 1999; Goldin and Katz 1997, 2003; Lleras-Muney 2002). Free public schooling at the elementary level spread across the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, and free secondary schooling proliferated in the early part of the twentieth century. As secondary schooling became more commonplace, states began to pass compulsory schooling laws. States often also passed child labor laws that stipulated minimum age or schooling requirements before a work permit would be granted. These state-specific compulsory schooling and child labor laws are correlated with the legal restrictions on marriage age, indicating that it might be important to consider the impact of all the laws simultaneously.There are at least two rationales often given for the use of state laws as policy instruments to limit teenagers’ choices. The first argument is that teens do not accurately compare short-run benefits versus long-run costs. If teens are making myopic decisions, restrictive state laws could prevent decisions they will later regret. It is also argued that the adverse effects associated with teenagers’ choices impose external costs on the rest of society. If these effects can be prevented, external costs (such as higher welfare expenditures) would also argue for restrictive state laws. Both teenage marriage and dropping out of high school are closely associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including poverty later in life. To assess the relevance of either argument, however, it is important to know whether the observed effects are causal.Any observed negative effects may be due to preexisting differences rather than a causal relationship between teen marriage (or schooling choices) and adverse adult outcomes. Women who marry as teens or drop out of school may come from more disadvantaged backgrounds or possess other unobserved characteristics that would naturally lead to worse outcomes. For example, teens choosing to marry young might have lower unobserved earnings ability, making it hard to draw conclusions about the causal relationship between teenage marriage and poverty.To identify the effect of a teenager’s marriage and schooling choices on future poverty, I use state-specific marriage, schooling, and child labor laws as instruments. Variation in these laws across states and over time can be used to identify the causal impact that teen marriage and high school completion have on future economic well-being. Although compulsory schooling laws have been used as instruments in a variety of settings, this appears to be the first time marriage laws have been used as instruments. The idea of the marriage law instrument is that states with restrictive marriage laws will prevent some teenagers from marrying who would have married young had they lived in a state with more permissive laws.Using the marriage, schooling, and labor laws affecting teens as instruments for early marriage and high school completion, I find strong negative effects for both variables on future poverty status. The baseline instrumental variables (IV) estimates imply 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 living in a family whose income is below the poverty line. The IV results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. In comparison, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates are very sensitive to how the data is aggregated, particularly for the early marriage variable. OLS estimates using grouped data are also large, while OLS estimates using individual-level data indicate a small effect for early teen marriage. Auxiliary data indicate a large amount of measurement error in the early marriage variable, suggesting the presence of attenuation bias in the individual-level OLS estimates.The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. I first briefly review the negative outcomes associated with teenage marriage and dropping out of school and discuss alternative perspectives on why teens might make these decisions. The following section describes the data and presents OLS estimates. The next section discusses the early marriage, compulsory schooling, and child labor laws that will be used as instruments. I then present the instrumental variable estimates and conduct several specification and robustness checks, including a discussion of measurement error issues and a reconciliation with the literature on teenage childbearing.