Essays on HIV, Marriage and Education in Sub Saharan Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of spatial variation in HIV rates on female marriage rates in Zambia. I formulate a search model that predicts lower marriage rates of educated females relative to uneducated females in regions with higher HIV rates. I use exogenous geographic variation in HIV rates to identify the causal effect of HIV on female marriage. The risk of HIV infection causes marriage rates to fall for educated females but rise for uneducated females. One explanation is that in high HIV regions: (1) educated females take the time to find a partner who will use condoms and get HIV tested, which delays marriage, and (2) uneducated females marry sooner because youth and virginity are prized by males, and employment opportunities are scarce. These findings imply that returns to education for young females are likely underestimated since they miss conceivably substantial health-related benefits. Is widow remarriage beneficial to child school enrollment? Women are widowed at relatively young ages in high-HIV areas of Sub Saharan Africa and are likely to have school-aged children. A main finding in the parental death literature is that the death of a mother hurts child education more so than does the death of a father. This masks important differences in child school enrollment across households who have experienced a father's death. This paper estimates the effect of widow remarriage on child school enrollment by exploiting regional variation in HIV, religion, and the sex ratio. The cross-country empirical results indicate that remarriage is detrimental to child enrollment for widows with less than six years of schooling, yet beneficial to child enrollment for widows with six or more years of schooling. This is consistent with (1) marital sorting by education (correlation=.7), (2) intra-household bargaining, and (3) differences in tastes for remarriage and schooling. A policy implication is that investing in female education in high-HIV areas - among those likely to become widows - can have multiplier effects, as there is complementarity between the returns to education on marriage market outcomes and children's education.