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Title: Myopic Matrimony and Dropout Decisions: Evidence Using State Laws for Marriage, Schooling, and Work

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2005

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Abstract: Do teenagers make decisions they will later regret or which impose costs on others? 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. To understand the personal and societal consequences of a teenager's choices and the desirability of legal restrictions, it is important to identify the causal effects of these choices. This paper uses an instrumental variables approach which takes advantage of variation in state laws which regulate the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The analysis combines information on these laws with data from the 1960, 1970, and 1980 U.S. Decennial Censuses and Vital Statistics marriage certificate data. 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 and different levels of data aggregation. In comparison, the OLS estimates are extremely sensitive to how the data is aggregated, particularly for the early marriage variable.

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Authors: Dahl, Gordon B.

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Publication Number: W11328

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Family and Marriage

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