While Roman, Catholic, English, and early American law may have allowed marriage at 12 for girls and 14 for boys, many questioned the advisability of such early unions. These common laws inherited from the British remained in force in America unless a specific state law was enacted to replace them (see “Marriage Law,” Encyclopædia Britannica 2005 ). By default, these provisions became the minimum marriage ages in colonial America. The minimum age requirements of 12 and 14 were eventually written into English civil law. When England broke away from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church carried with it the same minimum age requirements for the prospective bride and groom. This canon law governed most marriages in Western Europe until the Reformation. When Rome became Christianized, these age minimums were adopted into the ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church. In Ancient Rome, the appropriate minimum age was regarded as 14 for males and 12 for females. Historically, individuals were allowed to enter into a marriage contract at a very young age. 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.
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. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. 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. 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. 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.
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