Rohini Somanathan
(Dehli School of Economics)
will give a presentation on
Nudging Marriage Norms through Conditional Transfers
Abstract: We explore the ability of conditional cash transfer programs to reduce child marriages in the presence of heterogeneous social norms. Contrary to popular belief, we show that groups strong child marriage norms can exhibit larger program effects for a given transfer than groups with weak norms. We empirically explore this relationship between norms and transfers by combining household data reflecting marriage ages with administrative data on one of the earliest and largest programs to reduce child marriage in North India. Consistent with our theoretical results, we find that regions and households with strong early marriage norms do exhibit large effects. Our results suggest that norms can be influenced by modest financial incentives depending on the configuration of norms and laws relative to household preferences. It is not therefore surprising that attempts to aim to change culturally driven behavior through cash transfers have had mixed success.