Title: Evaluating the Impact of Ethiopia's Revised Family Code on Child Marriage and Women's Educational Attainment: Evidence from Generalized Difference-in-Differences and Instrumental Variable Estimation
Authors: Kim Teajong Workenh Eshatuu Sime
Volume: 10
Issue: 7
Pages: 1-14
Publication Date: 2026/07/28
Abstract:
Child marriage remains one of the most persistent barriers to women's educational attainment and socioeconomic empowerment in developing countries. To address this challenge, Ethiopia revised its Family Code in 2000, increasing the legal minimum age of marriage from 15 to 18 years. This study evaluates the causal impact of the Revised Family Code (RFC) on child marriage, age at first marriage, and women's educational attainment, and further examines the effect of child marriage on educational attainment. The analysis employs pooled data from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Surveys (2000, 2005, 2011, and 2016), comprising approximately 171,000 observations. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the RFC across Ethiopia's regional states, the study applies a generalized Difference-in-Differences (DID) model with multiple groups and time periods to estimate the policy effect. To address the endogeneity between child marriage and educational attainment, Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimation is employed using the policy treatment indicator as an instrumental variable. The findings show that implementation of the Revised Family Code significantly reduced the probability of child marriage, increased the average age at first marriage, and improved women's educational attainment. The instrumental variable estimates further reveal that delaying marriage substantially increases years of completed education, whereas child marriage significantly reduces educational attainment. Robustness checks using restricted samples, falsification tests, and policy endogeneity assessments confirm the validity and consistency of the results. The findings demonstrate that legal reform can generate meaningful improvements in women's educational outcomes when effectively implemented. The study contributes to the literature by providing one of the first causal evaluations of Ethiopia's Revised Family Code using generalized DID and instrumental variable approaches, offering important policy evidence for countries seeking to eliminate child marriage and advance gender equality under the Sustainable Development Goals.