Research

Child marriage remains widespread even though most countries have adopted a legal minimum marriage age of 18. Previous studies find that reforms rarely delay marriage on average, but evidence on where they bind and how they affect women’s life-cycle outcomes remains limited. I estimate causal effects of child marriage bans (CMBs), reforms setting 18 as the minimum age without parental-consent exceptions, in the largest cross-country sample to date, combining WORLD policy data with Demographic and Health Surveys from 20 countries that adopted a CMB between 1995 and 2023. Using a regression discontinuity design based on birth-month eligibility, I show that CMBs can reinforce pre-existing social shifts but cannot independently alter well-established marital institutions. While CMBs do not reduce child marriage on average, they do so in countries where its initial prevalence was low, although this effect is driven by one country, with suggestive evidence of similar effects where informal unions are less common or the pre-reform legal age was close to 18, as well as among girls aged 16 and 17. Independent of marriage timing, CMBs also raise the education of women’s husbands and reduce the justification of intimate partner violence.

Significant resources are allocated to targeted aid projects aimed at enhancing the socio-economic well-being of participants. Evaluating these projects is both time-consuming and costly. A major difficulty in these evaluations is identifying an adequate control group to accurately measure the treatment effects of the aid projects. We propose a cost-effective method for selecting a control group that can serve as a baseline for post-project evaluations. Specifically, we explore the feasibility of using existing secondary data sources, such as household surveys, to establish a control group that mirrors the treatment group in evaluation analyses based on interviews. We validate our approach using data from an educational programme in rural Ghana that targeted marginalized, out-of-school adolescent women. This setting exemplifies a highly specific aid intervention, common in many small-scale development initiatives. Our findings highlight the critical role of considering the project’s selection criteria when constructing a control group from existing secondary data. Furthermore, we emphasize the necessity of ensuring that survey questions administered to the treatment group match those used in the secondary data source to maintain comparability in evaluation analyses.

Over the past decade, a substantial body of research has emerged leveraging large-scale educational policy reforms in Africa - so-called Free Primary Education (FPE) policies - to examine the causal effect of education on women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Yet, reported effects are generally small and vary sufficiently such that zero mean effects cannot be ruled out. Importantly, part of this variability may reflect differences in sample construction and specification choices across studies, despite a strong concentration on only a small number of FPE countries. This paper offers a systematic, harmonised, and continent-wide quantitative evaluation of FPE-induced education on women’s SRH. Pooling all available Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from all countries that have ever implemented FPE, we employ best-practice, data-driven regression discontinuity designs (RDD) that generate robust estimates while minimising researcher discretion. Our results challenge the assumption of a uniform causal return to schooling for SRH. While FPE policies increased educational attainment and literacy in many cases - though not universally - they did not lead to improvements in women’s SRH outcomes on average. We find evidence of improvements only under specific conditions, particularly in settings characterised by very low baseline education and high prevailing fertility rates. We conclude that the abolition of school fees alone may be insufficient to generate equitable gains in schooling and to improve women’s reproductive health without complementary institutional conditions and supply-side investments.