In the first chapter, I study the effect of a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico on early marriage. I estimate the impact of the program leveraging its staggered implementation. The program provides monetary benefits to households, conditional on children’s school attendance. I find that, for female beneficiaries, exposure to the conditional cash transfer increased the probability of getting married. After five years of exposure to the program, beneficiary girls are, on average, almost 7 p.p more likely to be married than the control group. I find no effect for boys. These findings contrast with the previously documented positive effects of the program in education, which is usually associated with decreases in child marriage. I reconcile the simultaneous increase in marriage and education in a conceptual framework in which agents treat marriage as a normal good. I test the hypothesis that these results are driven by an income effect. I exploit the variation in household composition and find that non-eligible children in beneficiary households - who were only exposed to the increase in household income - were between 10 and 18p.p more likely to be married than their counterparts in non-treated villages.
In the second chapter, we study whether students' familiarity with test topics affects their performance and whether familiarity disparities in groups lead to unfair examinations. Consider a student who is asked to write, in a foreign language, about their experience at a museum. What is evaluated is their writing proficiency in that language. Does it matter if they have ever been in a museum for the quality of their writing? What if most students from a given social group have never been to a museum? Is the test unfair towards that group due to its choice of topic? Through an experiment, we increase the familiarity level of randomly chosen individuals with a given topic and test whether they perform better on a writing task on the same topic than their less informed counterparts. Through a survey, we obtain the distribution of familiarity with several topics used in a worldwide standardised English test and test whether the test is unfair towards any group in three categories: gender, culture and socioeconomic status.
In the third chapter, we look at the effect of a land registration reform on children's investment in Ethiopia. The land registration reform has potentially increased welfare due to land tenure, allowing for more productive land use and efficient labour allocation. We hypothesise that increases in welfare allow for more investment in nutrition in the form of better nutrition. We look at four health outcomes: stunting, wasting, underweight and anaemia. We find that children are healthier in regions that took part in the land registration program. They are less likely to be stunted, wasted and underweight. Point estimates are larger for boys than girls. In the same years, some regions in Ethiopia also approved the Revised Family Code, aiming at empowering women by improving their social and economic situation. Overall, we find no significant effect of this revision on the four health outcomes, and there is suggestive evidence that the interaction between the two reforms is harmful to children’s health.