Monetary incentives on inter-caste marriages in India: Theory and evidence

Ali Hortacsu, Sam Il Myoung Hwang and Divya Mathur

Journal of Development Economics, 2019, vol. 141, issue C

Abstract: We study the effect of a policy in India that offers monetary incentives to inter-caste marriages, in which one of the spouses is of historically disadvantaged castes, i.e., Scheduled Castes, and the other is not. We show that, in theory, the monetary incentives increase the incidence of exogamy, but may reduce the welfare of certain caste or gender. Building on our theoretical analysis, we estimate the effect of the monetary incentives on the incidence of exogamy, the welfare and inter-spousal transfers using National Family and Health Survey data. We find that a 10,000-rupee increase in the incentive raises the exogamy between Scheduled Caste men and non-Scheduled Caste women by 4 percent in rural India; however, we also find that the same increase reduces the welfare of women in rural areas.

Keywords: J12; H20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387818314548
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:deveco:v:141:y:2019:i:c:s0304387818314548

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019.102371

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().