Are age-of-marriage laws enforced? Evidence from developing countries

Objectives

The study aims to test whether minimum age-of-marriage laws are actually enforced in developing countries and whether they deter early marriage. It develops a simple outcome-based enforcement test using DHS and MICS data and regression-discontinuity density methods to detect “jumps” in marriage at the legal cutoff. It also examines how enforcement varies across countries and over time and whether it is related to legal reforms and broader measures of state capacity and country characteristics

Findings

Across more than 100 countries, many age-of-marriage laws show little or no evidence of binding enforcement, with only a small subset displaying clear and statistically significant bunching of marriages at the legal age. There is limited sign that enforcement is improving over time, and new or stricter child marriage bans are often followed by a fall in the measured discontinuity and a higher share of marriages below the legal age, suggesting that legal change can trigger substitution into underage or informal unions rather than compliance.

The discontinuity-based measures correlate negatively with rural residence and ethnic fractionalization and positively with average schooling, but they are not systematically related to standard state capacity indices, implying that the ability or willingness to enforce child marriage laws is shaped more by local context and norms than by broad national governance scores.

Recommendations

The authors argue that raising the legal age of marriage is unlikely to be sufficient on its own to curb child marriage and must be paired with credible enforcement mechanisms, routine monitoring of marriage age distributions, and attention to rural and norm-driven barriers. Policymakers should use household survey data and similar outcome-based tools to track whether legal reforms are actually binding, rather than relying only on the existence of laws or on headline prevalence trends. Donors and governments should integrate legal reform with investments in education, community norm change, and targeted enforcement in hard-to-reach settings so that age-of-marriage laws translate into real reductions in early and child marriage.