Forced Marriage and Birth Outcomes
Abstract
We study the impact of bride kidnapping, a peculiar form of marriage practiced in
Central Asia, on child birth weight. The search for a suitable mate in a kidnapped
marriage is initiated by the groom, and there is typically non-coerced consent only
by the male. We expect adverse consequences from such marriages, working through poor
spousal matching quality and subsequent psychosocial stress. We analyze survey data
from rural Kyrgyzstan. We apply several estimation models, including an IV estimation
in which we instrument kidnapping among young women with the district-level prevalence
of kidnapping among older women. Our findings indicate that children born to kidnapped
mothers are of a substantially lower birth weight than children born to mothers who
are not kidnapped. This has important implications for children’s long-term development;
it also discredits the ritualized-kidnapping-as-elopement view.
Type
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/13209Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Charles Maxwell Becker
Research Professor of Economics
Charles Becker is interested in exploring the economies of such countries as Kazakhstan,
India, sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. His research has focused on economic
demography, social security system forecasting, CGE modeling, mortality and disability
risk, determinants of health care utilization, computable general equilibrium simulation
modeling, and urban economics. His on-going projects involve assessing infant mortality
rates, poverty in developing countries, accidental deaths

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