*Female early marriage remains a common feature of marriages in developing countries, hindering women’s health, education and well-being outcomes. In Egypt, a major Muslim country of the Middle East North Africa region, around 17% of women were married by age 18 in 2014. Yet, in 2008, a child law reform raised the legal minimum age of marriage in the country from 15 to 18 years old. This project leverages the quasi-natural experiment arising from this ban to understand the changes it induced on the Egyptian marriage market. Theoretically, two mechanisms might be at play and will be tested: the law could have dissuaded families from engaging in early marriages, delaying marriages for women and allowing them to accumulate more premarital resources. However, the law could have also raised the value of young brides, increasing bride price and modifying negotiation terms of marriage contracts for these women. Using a panel data from the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey data (2006, 2012, 2018), I will study the impacts of this child law on marriage outcomes in order to disentangle these potential effects.

**In this presentation, I will give an overview of my PhD research project. Motivated by the trajectory of some representative south-American countries, I propose a new mechanism not explored yet in theoretical literature regarding how a country can dynamically evolve in its inequality, public education expenditure, and preferences for redistribution. After discussing how this mechanism relates to the central literature on the topic, I will present the main blocks of an intergenerational political economy model of inequality with a public education expenditure policy affecting social mobility and pre-tax income inequality. Finally, after discussing the model, I will briefly present a research idea on implementing an empirical assessment of the mechanism in these particular south-American countries.

***Vulnerable communities who rely on subsistence farming are disproportionately more likely to be negatively impacted by slow-onset climate change and weather shocks. This paper proposes a model of two adaptation mechanisms: short-distance (seasonal) migration and informal risk sharing in the presence of networks. We look into decisions taken in two periods: first, after realization of transfers, a household chooses between sending a migrant and investing into its crop. Second, “migrant households” who realize a positive migration income (or remittance) will decide whether to stay or not in the risk-sharing network. Looking into this dual effect will allow us to disentangle first the effect of weather-related vulnerability on migration decisions and then on local risk sharing networks, which often play an important consumption-smoothing role in low-income agrarian communities.