Working papers 

Policy and Practice: How Ethiopia’s Legal Marriage Age Requirements Shape Marriage Timing and Spousal Age Differences

Child marriage persists across many developing countries, limiting women’s health, education, and economic opportunities. Raising the legal minimum marriage age is a common policy response, yet its effects on marriage timing and spousal age differences remain unclear. This paper examines Ethiopia’s 2000 Revised Family Code (RFC), which raised the minimum marriage age for girls from 15 to 18 with a two-year exception period for “serious” cause with parental consent. I exploit the staggered regional implementation (2000-2008) using a difference-in-differences approach with an imputation-based estimator and data from four waves of the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (2000, 2005, 2011, 2016). I find that the RFC modestly delayed marriage timing by approximately 0.6 months on average, with apparently stable average spousal age gaps. However, this aggregate stability masks dramatic heterogeneity: while most couples preserved traditional age differences through symmetric delays, girls under 15 at implementation experienced a 4.5-year increase in spousal age gaps despite delaying marriage by 11.2 months. This occurred because legal constraints created asymmetric responses—the youngest girls faced substantial delays while their potential male partners (typically in their late teens and twenties) delayed minimally, leaving these vulnerable girls to marry much older partners by the time they become eligible to marry. Results remain robust across a wide range of sensitivity tests, including alternative clustering levels, placebo reform dates, and the exclusion of individuals exposed to concurrent social programs. Further heterogeneity analysis across different cultural norms shows “bunching” just above the age 16, reflecting adaptation especially in regions with higher pre-reform prevalence of child marriage and stricter norms. Overall, the findings suggest that legal reforms can generate modest behavioural responses in contexts where early marriage is prevalent, but statutory change alone is unlikely to produce large shifts in gender norms or household bargaining dynamics.

Employment Precarity and Financial Decision-Making Power: An Analysis on Married and/or Co-habiting Women in South Africa

While several empirical studies clearly highlight the relevance of labor force participation in improving women’s bargaining power, much is still unknown regarding how existing labor market conditions can impact this bargaining process. With the introduction of feminization of labor market policy in post-Apartheid South Africa, labor force participation among women rose, particularly in sectors with precarious employment. This study utilizes data from a five-year National Income Dynamic Survey (NIDS) to investigate the existing conditions that drove women into such precarious state and how it has affected their financial decision-making power. Specifically, I examine the causal implication of employment precarity on the financial decision-making among married and/or cohabiting women in post-Apartheid South Africa using the standard two-stage least squares (2SLS). The results, after correcting for endogeneity, indicate that employment precarity generally reduces the likelihood of a married and/or cohabiting woman to be a main financial decision maker by 8.15 percentage points and reduces her likelihood to be a joint financial decision maker by 5.15 percentage points. In contrast, analysis on a restricted sample of married and/or co-habiting women with partners’ information showed employment precarity to increase the likelihood to be either a main or joint financial decision after controlling for partners’ characteristics. Opposite results are observed for this sample possibly due to reduction in mean income of partners as a result of labor market flexibility induced high unemployment in formal employment sectors and/or the issuing of government grants to casually employed women. 

Publications

2022

Kwabena Nkansah, Paul Owusu Takyi, Daniel Sakyi, Frank Adusah-Poku
Economic Integration Agreements and Export Survival in Ghana
Journal of African Trade, 9(1), 1-22.

Work in Progress 

Sibling Gender, Inheritance Customs Law and Child Education: Evidence from Patrilineal and Matrilineal Societies in Ghana. (With Hardi Ahmed and Enoch Ntsiful) 

“Beyond Borders: Spatial Spillovers of Ethnic Diversity and Child Labor in Ghana”
Historical Persistence, Geographic Fragmentation, and Inter-District Effects.

Anti-FGM Policies and Female Genital Cutting: Evidence from Kenya and Nigeria.