Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak and Jeanne Lafortune

STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economicattributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique dataset on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper,the responses they received, how they ranked them, and the eventual matches. Weestimate the preferences for caste, education, beauty, and other attributes. We thencompute a set of stable matches, which we compare to the actual matches that weobserve in the data. We find the stable matches to be quite similar to the actualmatches, suggesting a relatively frictionless marriage market. One of our keyempirical findings is that there is a very strong preference for within-caste marriage.However, because both sides of the market share this preference and because thegroups are fairly homogeneous in terms of the distribution of other attributes, inequilibrium, the cost of wanting to marry within-caste is low. This allows caste toremain a persistent feature of the Indian marriage market

Date: 2009-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (2013)
Working Paper: Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (2012)
Working Paper: Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (2009)
Working Paper: Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (2009)
Working Paper: Marry for What: Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stieop:009

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