Marriage outcomes of displaced women

Abstract

To learn more about the long-term consequences of displacement on women, we examine the marriage market outcomes of forcibly displaced women. Using data from 12 representative surveys in 7 countries, we document that women who are adolescents at the time of displacement are more likely to be married. This pattern is robust to choice of comparison group and across countries. We do not find this pattern for displaced adolescent men. We provide additional evidence on this relationship by using unique features of the partition of India in 1947, an event which resulted in large-scale bilateral displacement between India and newly formed Pakistan. Specifically, we use the plausibly exogenous timing and the arbitrary nature of the border drawing to motivate a difference-in-difference design. Using a representative household survey collected in 1973, we find that women who were adolescents when they were displaced by partition were significantly more likely to marry earlier, in line with the descriptive cross country evidence. These women were less likely to continue their education and had more children overall, but do not appear to have married spouses with worse observable characteristics.