Polygyny and the economic determinants of family formation outcomes in sub-saharan Africa

Augustin Tapsoba ()
Additional contact information
Augustin Tapsoba: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper studies how short-term changes in aggregate economic conditions influence family formation outcomes in the presence of polygyny. It develops a simple marriage market framework with overlapping generations in which polygyny is modeled as a sequential one-to-one matching, and bride price acts as an important source of consumption smoothing. When there is a drought, the demand for second spouses (from older men) is more sensitive to the income and bride price drop than the demand for first/unique spouses (from younger men). This leads to an increase in the market share of younger men and a much smaller rise in the equilibrium quantity of female child marriage compared to the one observed in monogamous markets. The attenuation e˙ect is such that droughts have no detectable impact on the timing of marriage and fertility onset in high polygyny areas. Evidence from global crop price shocks confirms these patterns. It shows that higher food prices a˙ect marital outcomes in opposite directions in crop-producing and crop-consuming areas.

Keywords: Bride price; Income shocks; Informal insurance; Polygyny; Local norms; Marriage market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-09
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05649940v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05649940v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05649940

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().