结婚年龄与婚姻的稳定性：来自断点回归的证据

Exploiting the exogenous shock of change of marriage law, this paper estimates a quasi-natural experimental effect of age at marriage on marital stability for the first time. A new Marriage Law came into force in Jan. 1, 1981 in China, with new requirement on age at marriage. Using a regression discontinuity design by restricting sample to those married just before and after 1981, this paper finds that probability of divorce increases by age at marriage. One year delay of age at marriage increases the probability of divorce by 3 to 6 percentage points. On the contrary, the results from conventional OLS estimation show that delay of age at marriage either has no effects or has a small positive effect on marital stability, suggesting the OLS estimates suffer from severe omitted variable bias. This study suggests that increase in age at marriage is one important cause of the increase of divorce rates during recent year in China.