Climate change, culture and marriage timing in Malawi

This paper examines how climate-induced shocks interact with cultural norms to shape marriage timing and spousal age gaps in Malawi, addressing the broader question of climate change’s social consequences in vulnerable communities. Using data from Malawi, a country highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, I employ survival analysis to show that drought and flood shocks differentially influence the hazard into first marriages and husband-wife age gaps, with nuanced variations across bride price and non-bride price societies. Notably, droughts delay marriage among young men in bride price societies due to the binding transfer at marriage, while this effect is muted for older men who are more self-insured and resilient to the shock, thereby widening spousal age gaps and pushing more young women into polygynous unions as junior wives. In contrast, floods have little impact on marriage timing, as their localized nature makes them less spatially correlated as droughts, enabling households to cope more effectively. From a policy standpoint, policies and interventions that generate windfall revenue during adverse economic shocks could have unintended consequences especially for women, if the type of shock and cultural setting is not taken into account. Cash transfers, for example, during droughts may have larger effects in bride price societies if targeted at households with marriage-age girls.