Returns to Education in the Marriage Market: Bride Price and School Reform in Egypt

Jingyuan Deng, Nelly Elmallakh, Luca Flabbi and Roberta Gatti

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2026, vol. 74, issue 4, 1309 - 1351

Abstract: This paper investigates the marriage market returns to female education in terms of bride price outcomes and husbands’ imputed permanent income. We exploit a primary school reform in Egypt and identify returns with an instrumental variable estimator combined with a two-way fixed effects model. We find that the return on compulsory education is more than triple in bride price and 20% higher in the husband’s permanent income, while no effect on the extensive margin of employment is found. Further evidence suggests that mechanisms include educational assortative mating and a positive relationship between female education and child-rearing.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739049 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739049 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/739049

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().