Dowry: Household Responses to Expected Marriage Payments
by
Anukriti
Boston College
On
11th August, 2016 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM
Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
All are cordially invited
Abstract
Dowry is a ubiquitous feature of South Asian marriage markets. Using retrospective data on 39,544 marriages that occurred during 1960-2008, first we describe dowry trends in contemporary rural India. We find that average real net dowry has remained stable over time; however, there is considerable temporal and cross-sectional variation across religions, castes, and states. We then examine how dowry expectations affect household savings, parents’ labor supply, and child investments.
