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Reducing Child Marriages Through CCTS: Evidence From A Large-Scale Policy Intervention in Indonesia
There is limited empirical evidence on whether poverty-targeted conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can be an effective tool in reducing child marriages. Employing a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity design that uses administrative roll-out data matched to the government’s poverty census and targeting database in Indonesia, we estimate that the country’s flagship CCT (PKH) reduced child marriages of girls in rural Indonesia by about 2.8 percentage points (about 22 percent). Reductions in girls’ child marriage rates are found to be primarily related to improvements in women’s empowerment as a result of PKH but not necessarily to income effects and the various education and health conditionalities involved in the program. We conclude that CCTs may help break the persistent practice of child marriages.
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