Data and Code for: A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years of incentive are 19% less likely to marry underage, the empowerment program failed to decrease adolescent marriage. We show that these results are consistent with a signaling model in which bride type is imperfectly observed but preferred types (socially conservative girls) have lower returns to delaying marriage. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we observe substantial spillovers of the incentive on untreated non-preferred types.
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即使在女性受教育与就业机会不断提升的地区，童婚现象依然普遍存在。本研究在孟加拉国开展实验，评估了旨在推迟婚姻的经济激励措施与女童赋权项目的协同效果。研究结果显示，符合两年经济激励计划条件的女童，其未成年结婚的概率降低了19%；但女童赋权项目并未有效降低青少年婚姻发生率。我们的分析表明，上述结果与信号传递模型（signaling model）的预测相符：新娘的个体特质难以被完全观测，但受偏好的特质类型（即社会保守型女童），其推迟婚姻所获得的收益反而更低。与我们的理论预测一致，我们观察到该经济激励措施对未接受干预的非受偏好类型女童产生了显著的溢出效应。