The Impact of Consanguineous Marriage on Children’s Human Capital in Pakistan

Cousin marriage is an important social institution in many parts of Asia and Africa; yet few studies have looked beyond the health consequences to its role in shaping intrahousehold dynamics. We use a unique survey of households in Pakistan to examine the role of parental consanguinity on education, child work and vaccination, and how those effects differ by gender. We apply ordinary least squares, Tobit, inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment treatment effects and intent-to-treat estimation techniques to a dataset of 1,020 households from 9 districts and control for a rich set of covariates. We model selection into consanguineous marriage using the availability of opposite-gender marriageable cousins. Our results show that the adult children of parents who are first cousins completed fewer years of education and are less likely to have attended school. Educational attainment was curtailed equally for daughters of both marriage arrangements, but consanguineous daughters faced a double burden of consanguinity and gender discrimination. For school-aged children of consanguineous couples, the number of days of school missed is higher in some specifications, but enrolment and educational expenditures are roughly the same as children of parents who are not related or are related more distantly. In contrast, domestic work is somewhat reduced for the offspring of first-cousin parents. Daughters of consanguineous parents are less likely to have received vaccinations, although this effect is weaker in the sample of school-aged children than adult children.