# fixed effects.

Luckily, both DHS rounds include information on marital history for women who are currently married but report having had a prior union. This information is rarely collected in surveys and not available in previous rounds of the Nigeria DHS.<sup>14</sup> It allows us to construct a marital status variable that differentiates among currently married women to include the following categories: single, married in first union (i.e., married once), married and previously widowed, married and previously divorced or separated, currently widowed, and currently divorced or separated. Even so, these variables do not encompass a woman’s entire marital history: although we know how a remarried woman’s last union ended, information is not available for all possible prior unions. Similarly, for current widows and divorcees, no detail is collected on previous unions other than that there was one or more. It would, for example, be useful to know when a dissolution occurred and hence the duration of widowhood or divorce.

In addition to a woman’s marital status, other individual level covariates include the woman’s age and its square, years of education, whether pregnant, head of household or the head’s spouse, and her ethnic group.<sup>15</sup> We are able to control for the five major groups: Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, and Igala, as all have at least some within-group religious variation (these are entered as five dummies). Characteristics of the woman’s household include size and composition (shares of members aged 0-5, 6-14, 15-64, 65 and over, all by gender)<sup>16</sup> ; the head’s gender (one if female), age, age squared, and education; and the log of the household’s DHScomputed wealth index.<sup>17</sup> The last could raise endogeneity concerns. Against that, omitted variable bias is likely to be a potential concern if we exclude wealth, so we leave it in. That said, leaving the wealth index out makes little difference to the variables of interest.

Religion is asked of all interviewed women. Note that there is heterogeneity among Christians as we aggregate Catholics and other Christians together. The same can be said of

> 14 The marital status of household members is collected in the household questionnaire. Details on marital history are from the women’s questionnaire and thus available only for the 15-49 group. ‘Married’ includes women who report cohabiting with a man (1.8% of the sample). The divorced and separated are also grouped together. ‘Currently separated’, and ‘remarried, previously separated’ women account for 1% and 1.9% of all women, respectively. 15 We also tested controls for age at first marriage and first birth, husband’s education and whether polygamous. The results are qualitatively the same. As these characteristics do not apply to all women (e,g. single women), we prefer to omit them rather than restricting the sample further. Results available upon request.

> 16 The share of male members aged 65 and over is the omitted household composition group.

> 17 The wealth index is a proxy for household welfare generated using principal components analysis on assets; housing construction materials; and type of water access and sanitation facilities. The index places households on a continuous scale of relative wealth.

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