IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/popdev/v50y2024i4p1091-1115.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

COVID‐19 Pandemic and Women's Age at Marriage: New Evidence From India

Author

Listed:
  • Deepshikha Batheja
  • Abhik Banerji
  • Amit Summan
  • Ramanan Laxminarayan
  • Arindam Nandi

Abstract

A rich literature has documented the relationship between age at marriage and girls’ health and educational outcomes. The upheaval caused by the pandemic on household decision‐making has been hypothesized to have influenced the age of marriage, but the direction of impact is unclear. On the one hand, the pandemic may have increased the age at marriage if lockdown policies and negative income shocks to families placed a burden on household wealth and the ability to pay for weddings. On the other hand, the age of marriage could have decreased during the pandemic due to school closures that kept girls out of school, parental deaths that encouraged families to expedite weddings, and lower wedding costs because of government mandates to have smaller weddings. Using data from the National Family Health Survey of 2019–2021 of India, we explore how the pandemic impacted age at marriage for women using district and household fixed effects models. After accounting for secular trends in the age of marriage and contingent on the model and specification, we find a significant increase in age at marriage for women who got married during the pandemic by 1.1–1.2 years as compared with those married before the pandemic.

Suggested Citation

  • Deepshikha Batheja & Abhik Banerji & Amit Summan & Ramanan Laxminarayan & Arindam Nandi, 2024. "COVID‐19 Pandemic and Women's Age at Marriage: New Evidence From India," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 50(4), pages 1091-1115, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:popdev:v:50:y:2024:i:4:p:1091-1115
    DOI: 10.1111/padr.12680
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12680
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/padr.12680?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:popdev:v:50:y:2024:i:4:p:1091-1115. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0098-7921 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.