Environmental Consumption and Marriage Timing in Nepal

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Marital Timing and Intermarriage

Abstract

Using the unique panel data from a natural resource- dependent community in the western Chitwan Valley of rural Nepal, this study investigates the influence of household environmental consumption on the rate of male marriage. In this setting marriage is universal and occurs at a relatively young age. This paper focuses on marriage timing of men, which has important implications, including direct consequences for the marriage timing of women because men tend to marry women who are younger than themselves. Like in other poor countries, many households in rural Nepal rely on firewood as an important source of domestic energy. These households depend on family labor, particularly of women, for cooking and collecting firewood from the forest. Using the labor demand framework, we argue that the dependence on family labor will encourage early marriage among males, as marriage introduces a new wife into the household who can both contribute labor and bear children who will contribute labor in the future. Results from discrete-time event history analysis demonstrate that the use of firewood increases the rate of marriage among males, but the availability of family labor for firewood collection decreases the rate of male marriage. These findings offer important insights for understanding early marriage in Nepal and the South Asian region.

Authors

• Elyse A. Jennings, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Prem Bhandari, University of Michigan