Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how climate change and natural disasters impact the prevalence of child marriage in rural Bangladesh. We aim to examine the mechanisms of this impact and find a causal linkage with policy variables to analyse the relevance of policy prescriptions for rural Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

Child marriage is a crucial challenge, particularly in the developing world. The socioeconomic drivers of child marriage are well-studied in the literature. However, the link between child marriage and climate change is less established. We use the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey, a nationally representative household panel data from rural Bangladesh, to fill this gap. We use robust econometric methods to find a significant positive association between child marriage and natural disasters and deviations in Bangladesh's historical temperature and precipitation data in individual and household-level data. Other important factors include the age and sex of the household head, the education level of females at the time of marriage, and household size. We use geographic information to check for spatial autocorrelation at the union level. We also incorporated significant control factors at the union level for our model's specification and robustness checks. Our goal is to examine the mechanisms of this impact and find a causal linkage with policy variables such as access to social protection to analyse the relevance of policy prescriptions for climate-vulnerable people of rural Bangladesh.