UCLA

Child marriage and early childbearing disempower girls and severely impact maternal and child health. These practices often occur in the context of gender inequality and overlapping deprivations. Enhanced access to secondary schooling, economic support to girls and their families, and fostering an enabling legal and policy environment might help address these issues. While a few cross-sectional surveys and small-scale randomized experiments suggest these strategies hold promise, their impact on a national scale across multiple settings is largely unknown. This dissertation comprises three research papers, each looking at a policy, program, or legal intervention that has the potential to advance progress on these outcomes.The first paper examines whether making secondary school tuition-free delays marriage and childbearing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the difference-in-differences strategy and the Demographic and Health Surveys data, I observe significantly large reductions in the probability of marriage and childbearing before ages 15 and 18 associated with making secondary school tuition-free. The findings show it is important to support tuition-free secondary education as a policy instrument to delay marriage and childbearing. The second paper builds evidence on the effectiveness of conditional cash transfer programs (CCT) by evaluating Apni Beti Apna Dhan (ABAD), a statewide CCT program in Haryana, India. I find strong evidence in favor of the program's impact in delaying girls' marriage until 18 years, mixed evidence for delaying childbearing and the interval between marriage and childbearing, and no evidence of its impact on schooling and son preference. The findings suggest that while conditioning on marriage to receive cash incentives might delay marriage, CCTs need to be more holistic for girls to realize their human rights fully.� The third paper evaluates whether reserved seats for women in national- and subnational-level governing bodies influence child marriage and early childbearing across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I compare trends in outcomes in each of these countries to trends in similar countries within the region without gender quotas. While I find no impact of gender quota on child marriage and early childbearing in short- to medium-run, the long-run effects exploring its interaction with other policies warrant further investigation.