Rozenn HOTTE

Abstract Early marriage persists in many countries in spite of legal prohibition. The role of income shocks and bride price norms is investigated in the context of Turkey. Using data from the Turkey Demographic and Health Surveys 1998 to 2018, rainfall shocks are exploited as an exogenous source of variation of household income. To study the role of marital payments, measures of shocks are interacted with a province-level indicator based on past prevalence of bride price. Estimation results show that girls exposed to a large negative shock during adolescence have a higher probability of being married before 15, if living in provinces with a high prevalence of bride price. More arranged and forced marriages are found after severe shocks in those provinces. Results suggest that daughter marriage, as a response to mitigate negative income shocks, is not limited to the poorest countries, and still contributes to household strategies in Turkey.

In low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), unequal sharing of resources within the household has important consequences for poverty measurement and policy targeting. This chapter provides a critical, methodological review of the three main approaches used to measure intra-household inequality, assessing what each can credibly reveal and where its limitations lie. Mortality and anthropometric outcomes reveal marked gender discrimination. Collective household models theoretically allow individual resource shares to be inferred from aggregate household data, but their applicability in LMICs is seriously limited: the assumption of Pareto efficiency rarely holds, owing to bargaining frictions, information asymmetries, and frequent exogenous shocks. Moreover, the resulting estimates of child poverty are often implausibly high relative to that of their parents, raising doubts about the relevance of the identifying assumptions in LMICs contexts.

More direct evidence comes from sub-household consumption data, illustrated by the Senegalese Poverty and Family Structure (PSF) survey, which shows that intrahousehold inequality accounts for 14% of total inequality, with more than 13% of poor individuals living in households classified as non-poor. In the complex households typical of LMICs, an individual's position -daughter-in-law, widow, junior co-wife -proves as important as gender in shaping access to resources. We argue that credibly identifying the most vulnerable household members requires moving beyond standard household surveys toward more granular data collection at the individual or sub-household level.