Early marriage restrains women's agency and bargaining strength in postmarital households, impairing their ability to make meaningful contributions to household decision making. This paper employs a comprehensive measure of women's empowerment in the domestic and productive spheres, and isolates the causal effect of age at marriage, instrumented by age at menarche, on their bargaining strength, using nationally representative data from Bangladesh. Results suggest that delayed marriages result in significantly higher empowerment scores and probability of being empowered for women, because of higher likelihood in achieving adequacy in their autonomy in agricultural production, control over income, ownership of assets and rights in those assets, and ability to speak in public. Favorable impacts of delayed marriage are also found on women's freedom of mobility, fertility choices, and their ability to decide on household expenses and investments, with the impacts likely coming via improvements in education and labor market outcomes when women married later.

中文翻译：

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早婚对女性讨价还价能力的因果影响：来自孟加拉国的证据

早婚限制了妇女在婚后家庭中的能动性和议价能力，削弱了她们为家庭决策做出有意义贡献的能力。本文对妇女在家庭和生产领域的赋权进行了综合衡量，并利用孟加拉国的全国代表性数据，分离出以初潮年龄为衡量标准的结婚年龄对其讨价还价能力的因果影响。结果表明，晚婚会导致女性的赋权得分和获得赋权的可能性显着提高，因为她们在农业生产、收入控制、资产所有权和这些资产的权利以及话语能力方面实现充分自主权的可能性更高公开的;当众。晚婚还对妇女的流动自由、生育选择以及她们决定家庭开支和投资的能力产生有利影响，而这种影响可能来自于妇女晚婚时教育和劳动力市场结果的改善。