University of California, San Diego, and National Bureau of Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0508, USA.
Demography. 2010 Aug;47(3):689-718. doi: 10.1353/dem.0.0120.
Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to preexisting differences, or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, in this article, I use an instrumental variables (IV) approach that takes advantage of variation in state laws regulating the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The baseline IV estimate indicates that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. While grouped ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates for the early teen marriage variable are also large, OLS estimates based on individual-level data are small, consistent with a large amount of measurement error
早婚和高中辍学历来与各种负面后果相关联，包括终身贫困率较高。这些负面后果是由于先前存在的差异造成的，还是代表了婚姻和教育选择的因果效应？为了更好地了解真实的个人和社会后果，在本文中，我使用工具变量（IV）方法，利用各州法律对允许个人结婚、辍学和开始工作的年龄的差异进行分析。基本的 IV 估计表明，早婚的女性在年老时生活贫困的可能性要高出 31 个百分点。同样，辍学的女性贫困的可能性要高出 11 个百分点。这些结果在各种替代规范和估计方法下都是稳健的，包括有限信息极大似然估计（LIML）和控制函数方法。虽然早婚变量的分组最小二乘法（OLS）估计值也很大，但基于个人层面数据的 OLS 估计值很小，这与大量测量误差一致。
