Age at First and Current Marriage and Women’s Entrepreneurship in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper relies on the 2008 and 2013 Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys and an instrumental variable estimation strategy to estimate the relationship between a Nigerian woman’s age at entry into her first and current marriage and entrepreneurship. The result suggests a 5-percentage point higher likelihood of engaging in entrepreneurship for women with an additional year of at marriage entry. Further, there is about a 12-percentage point increase in the likelihood of continuous engagement in self-employed work over the prior year with an additional year of age at marriage entry. This result is consistent for women who reside in rural and urban locations. Premarital investments in education, lower fertility, and better intramarriage bargaining power are the likely operative channels that explain the estimated relationship.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Early marriage entry has economic costs and hurts women’s overall empowerment.

• Early marriage in Nigeria is mainly influenced by religious and cultural factors.

• Women who marry early are less likely to engage in entrepreneurship and to do so continuously.

• There are no geographic differences in the effects of early marriage entry on entrepreneurship.

• Later marriage is associated with better education, declining fertility, and improved bargaining power of women.

KEYWORDS:

• Bargaining power
• empowerment
• entrepreneurship
• Nigeria
• sexuality

JEL Codes:

• J1
• J12
• L26

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful for the constructive comments from the editor, associate editor, and the three anonymous reviewers. The first author is also thankful to the management of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana, for extending his research stay during the COVID-19 pandemic that aided the completion of the revision of this manuscript.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.1943486.

Notes

1 This implies that some households include both eligible men and women, while others consist of only eligible women. Eligibility implies that the surveyed women/men are within the age category 15–49 years, and individuals who are permanent residents within the households or who are present over the night before the survey was conducted.

2 Though not reported, the Hausman test suggests that the null hypothesis of exogeneity of age at first and current marriage in equation (1) can be rejected at the 1 percent significance level.

3 The age of the woman at her first sexual encounter is probably below 18 since the encounter is with a teenage boy. There is no evidence of older women having a sexual encounter with teenage boys in most Nigerian communities.

4 As displayed in Figures 1a and 2a (see Online Appendix under Supplemental Materials tab), women who engage in entrepreneurship activities see significant difference in some measures of empowerment (that is, husband’s having less control over their decisions and husband’s not trusting women with money).

5 Child marriage in Nigeria is defined as a formal or an informal union before the age of full maturity, usually 18 years. See: https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Strategy-to-end-child-marriage_for-printing_08-03-2017.pdf.

6 The IPW strategy is a double-robust estimation strategy that uses a different model to compute the so-called treatment status. This computation is based on a three-step approach as follows. First, the treatment model parameters are estimated and then the inverse-probability weights are further computed. Second, the different outcomes for each treatment level are predicted; and third, the weighted means of the treatment-specific predicted outcomes and the difference of the weighted averages are computed to predict the Average Treatment Effects (ATEs) of the population. The PSM strategy estimates the ATE and the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATET) by computing the difference in the average outcomes of the treatment group with a similar match from the comparison. The basis for the matching process is the computed propensity scores (see Abadie and Imbens 2016). The ATE, therefore, measures the average effects in the treatment effects context, that is, $E\left[Y_{1i}-Y_{0i}\right]$ and the average treatment effect on the treated, that is, $E\text{[}{Y}_{1i}-Y_{0i}|D_i=1]$ estimators predict treatment status. Overall, the ATE is relevant in cases where the treatment applies to the entire population represented by the sample data. ATET is relevant when the interest lies in the effect of the treatment for those who are treated. Both techniques adjust for differences in the distribution between the two groups of women and therefore eliminate all confounding differences to estimate the effect (Abadie and Imbens2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uchenna R. Efobi

Uchenna R. Efobi was on the faculty of Covenant University, Nigeria, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research, Nigeria. He was also Junior Research Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana. His main research interests are the study of development policies, poverty, and empowerment for the most vulnerable groups in developing countries. More broadly, his research interests intersect with health, ecological, and development economics. His research has been published in journals including Small Business Economics, Environment and Development Economics, and Journal of Development Effectiveness.

Oluwabunmi Adejumo

Oluwabunmi Adejumo is a faculty member of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Development Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Development Research-Covenant University, Nigeria, and an alumnus of the Institute of Housing Studies, Erasmus University, Netherlands. She holds a PhD in economics from Obafemi Awolowo University. She is an active member of the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Program (IUSDRP), Germany, and has participated as an associate editor of the IUSDRP Encyclopedia series on Sustainable Development Goals. Her research interests include labor, gender, and development issues.

Scholastica Ngozi Atata

Scholastica Ngozi Atata holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her research interests include conflict, identity, development, gender, and ethnic and cultural studies. She is Lecturer in the Department of Communication and General Studies at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria, where she teaches sociology and social problems and culture. She is a member of the International Sociological Association and African Studies Association, a recipient of the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, and an alumna of Brown International Advanced Research Institutes, Brown University, US. Dr. Atata has published papers in reputable journals.