Does anyone pay attention to age-of-marriage laws?

Child and early marriage is associated with bad outcomes for women and girls. Though many countries have raised the legal age of marriage, the incidence early mar- riage remains stubbornly high. We develop a simple model of marriage behaviour to explain how effective laws create discontinuities or ‘jumps’ in the number of women getting married at the legal cut-off. We formally test for these discontinuities in real-world data using multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) covering over 60 countries by applying distributional tests derived from the regression- discontinuity literature. Most countries are not actually enforcing the laws in their books, and enforcement is not getting better over time. A key contribution is there- fore a simple, tractable way to monitor legal efficacy using observational data that may help to create the feedback loop between national polices and the outcome that matters for women and girls. Separately, we demonstrate that various measures of age-of-marriage discontinuities are systematically related to with existing, popular measures of rule-of-law and government effectiveness. We conclude by arguing that using laws to enforce adult marriage will not be effective in many settings.童婚与早婚会对女性与女童造成诸多不良后果。尽管诸多国家已提高法定结婚年龄，但早婚发生率仍居高难下。本研究构建了一个简洁的婚姻行为模型，用以阐释有效的婚姻法律如何在法定结婚年龄阈值处，造成女性结婚人数的间断性跳跃特征。本研究利用覆盖60余个国家的多轮人口与健康调查（Demographic and Health Surveys，DHS）数据，结合断点回归（regression discontinuity）相关文献推导的分布检验方法，对真实世界数据中的此类间断性特征进行了正式检验。研究发现，多数国家实际上并未落实其书面上的婚姻法律，且执法力度并未随时间推移有所提升。因此本研究的一项核心贡献在于，提出了一种简洁且易于操作的观测数据驱动方法，用以监测婚姻法律的实施效力，该方法或有助于搭建国家政策与女性、女童福祉结果之间的反馈闭环。此外，本研究还证实，各类婚姻年龄断点衡量指标与现有主流的法治（rule of law）、政府效能（government effectiveness）衡量指标存在系统性关联。本研究最终得出结论：在诸多场景下，仅凭立法强制推行成年婚并不具备可行性与有效性。