Does anyone pay attention to age-of-marriage laws?

Child and early marriage is associated with bad outcomes for women and girls. Though many countries have raised the legal age of marriage, the incidence early mar- riage remains stubbornly high. We develop a simple model of marriage behaviour to explain how effective laws create discontinuities or ‘jumps’ in the number of women getting married at the legal cut-off. We formally test for these discontinuities in real-world data using multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) covering over 60 countries by applying distributional tests derived from the regression- discontinuity literature. Most countries are not actually enforcing the laws in their books, and enforcement is not getting better over time. A key contribution is there- fore a simple, tractable way to monitor legal efficacy using observational data that may help to create the feedback loop between national polices and the outcome that matters for women and girls. Separately, we demonstrate that various measures of age-of-marriage discontinuities are systematically related to with existing, popular measures of rule-of-law and government effectiveness. We conclude by arguing that using laws to enforce adult marriage will not be effective in many settings.