International Migration and Age at Marriage of Male Workers: Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

Background:A substantial amount of literature shows that marriage is welfare increasing. Hence, international migration can affect welfare of migrants through their age at marriage. There is however limited evidence on the effect of the international migration of unskilled workers on their age at marriage. Methods:Since migration is endogenously determined, I use the migration network as an instrument for migration. Migration and marriage can be joint events; hence, I estimate reduced form regressions instead of two-stage OLS. Results:This paper estimates the effect of international migration of male workers on their age at marriage. Further I examine the effect of male migration on age at marriage of women. Results show that the migration of male workers decreases the probability of being married, suggesting that international migration increases age at marriage. Further, I find that male migration decreases the probability of being married of females. Results also show that male migration is likely to decrease early marriage among girls, a striking result because the rate of early marriage among girls is very high in Bangladesh. Conclusions:There is only one paper that estimates the effect of international migration of low skilled workers on their age at marriage but that study uses a sample of G2G migrants. Our study address this data limitation and estimate the effect using data on migrants that emigrated through various channel. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge our paper is the first to examine the effect of male migration on age at marriage of females.