'Arranged' Marriage, Co-Residence and Female Schooling: a Model with Evidence from India

Indraneel Dasgupta (), Pushkar Maitra, and Diganta Mukherjee

Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, CREDIT

Abstract: We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated brides, some parents can prevent costly household partition. Paternalistic self-interest consequently generates low levels of female schooling in the steady state equilibrium. State payments to parents for educating daughters fail toraise female schooling levels. Policies (such as housing subsidies) that promote nuclear families, interventions against early marriages, and state support to couples who marry against parental wishes, are however all likely to improve female schooling. We offer evidence from India consistent with our theoretical analysis.

Keywords: Arranged marriage; Dowry; Bride price; Female literacy; Marriage markets; Stable marriage allocation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/credit/research/papers/cp0603.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: ‘Arranged’ Marriage, Co-Residence and Female Schooling: A Model with Evidence from India (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notcre:06/03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, CREDIT
Address: School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().