21/09/2026

Timo Kapelari

PhD Researcher

"Stolen brides: Weather Shocks and Forced Marriages in Kyrgyzstan"

Abstract

Forced marriage remains a stark reality for women worldwide. In Kyrgyzstan, up to half of ethnic Kyrgyz women are married through forced abduction, a practice linked to intimate-partner violence, marital instability, and worse education and labor-market outcomes. We provide the first causal evidence on what drives forced abduction marriage, and on which men are most likely to abduct a bride. Combining five decades of retrospective marriage histories from the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey with community-level precipitation records, we show that winter droughts raise the annual probability of abduction marriage by 3.7 to 4.0 percentage points, more than double the baseline rate in non-drought years. Descriptive evidence suggests the response is not purely financial: men who marry by abduction score 0.20 to 0.24 standard deviations higher on a measure of traditional masculinity than men who marry for love. When economic hardship threatens a man's status as provider, men appear to use abduction to reassert their masculine status.

For past presentations, click here.