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This study adopts a cohort perspective to explore trends in child marriage – defined as the proportion of girls who entered first union before the age of 18 – and the effectiveness of policy changes aimed at curbing child marriage by increasing the minimum legal age of marriage. We adopt a cross-national perspective comparing six low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that introduced changes in the minimum age at marriage over the past two decades. These countries belong to three broad regions: Sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Mauritania), Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan), and South Asia (Nepal, Bhutan). We combine individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys with longitudinal information on policy changes from the PROSPERED (Policy-Relevant Observational Studies for Population Health Equity and Responsible Development) project. We adopt data visualization techniques and a regression discontinuity design to obtain estimates of the effect of changes in age-at-marriage laws on early marriage. Our results suggest that changes in minimum-age-at-marriage laws were not effective in curbing early marriage in Benin, Mauritania, Kazakhstan, and Bhutan, where child marriage showed little evidence of decline across cohorts. Significant reductions in early marriage following law implementations were observed in Tajikistan and Nepal, yet their effectiveness depended on the model specification and window adopted, thus making them hardly effective as policies to shape girls' later life trajectories. Our findings align with existing evidence from other countries suggesting that changes in age-at-marriage laws rarely achieve the desired outcome. In order for changes in laws to be effective, better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls. Alternative policies need to be devised to ensure that girls’ later-life outcomes, including their participation in higher education and society, are ensured, encouraged, and protected.

In spite of a peculiar pattern of the age at first birth in Latin America, there is little research about the long-term trends in the timing of transition to motherhood at all stages of women's reproductive lives and across countries in the region. This paper examines the evolution of educational disparities in the age at first birth during the fertility transition in three Andean region countries: Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. Using birth history information available in the latest Population and Housing Censuses, I estimate the first-birth age-specific rates disaggregated by various measures of education level, for cohorts born between 1945 and 1980. In all countries, educational expansion was accompanied by increasing rates of first birth before the age of 20 among women with below completed higher education, but the most drastic change occurred among women who dropped out of secondary school. Concurrently, the first-birth rates at the age of 20-29 decreased for women who achieved higher education; an evidence of an increase in the rates above the age of 30 among them started to emerge. A pronounced divergence in the first-birth timing between the educational groups occurred during the fertility transition. Comparison of a relative and an absolute educational level classification shows that the increasing disparities between the lowest and the highest educated women were similarly pronounced even when accounting for the changes in educational composition across cohorts. This paper discusses the potential factors behind the polarization in the age at first birth in the region. It argues that there is a need for policies encouraging not only secondary school entrance but also secondary school completion in the context of substantial educational expansion and high levels of school dropout observed in the region.

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