On the impact of early marriage on schooling outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and South West Asia

•The paper is based on 36 countries from Sub-Saharan Africa and South West Asia.•It analyses the effect of early marriage on three educational outcomes for women.•OLS under-estimates schooling regional gains from ending early marriage.•Poverty and low empowerment are indirect channels of low schooling among young wives.

This paper examines the effect of age of marriage on women's schooling outcomes for 36 countries from Sub-Saharan Africa and South West Asia. We employ an instrumental variable approach to account for the endogeneity of early marriage driven by socio-economic and cultural factors. Our results show that delaying early marriage by one year is associated with an increase of half a year of education in Sub-Saharan Africa and nearly one third of a year of education in South West Asia as well as a lower likelihood of dropping out from secondary school of 5.5% in South West Asia.