Beyond the vows: Understanding the causal link between age at marriage and anxiety in Nepal

This paper investigates the causal effect of age at marriage on women's mental health in Nepal, focusing specifically on anxiety. Using nationally representative data from the latest round of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), we address endogeneity in marriage timing by in- strumenting age at marriage with age at menarche, motivated by sociological evidence that menarche strongly in uences parental decisions about the timing of girls' marriages. Our findings show that a one-year delay in age at marriage reduces anxiety levels by 0.08 standard deviation. We find ad- ditional evidence that delayed marriage is associated with significant reductions in marital stress, suggesting that it is a key pathway through which delayed marriage lowers anxiety. These findings contribute to growing evidence on the mental health implications of early marriage and highlight the importance of policies that delay marriage age.