Selling daughters: age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition

Abstract

When markets are incomplete, cultural norms may play an important role in shaping economic behavior. In this paper, we explore whether income shocks increase the probability of child marriages in societies that engage in bride price payments -transfers from the groom to the bride's parents at marriage. We develop a simple model in which households are exposed to income volatility and have no access to credit markets. If a daughter marries, the household obtains a bride price and has fewer members to support. In this framework, girls have a higher probability of marrying early when their parents have higher marginal utility of consumption because of adverse income shocks. We test the prediction of the model by exploiting variation in rainfall shocks over a woman's life cycle, using a survey dataset from rural Tanzania. We find that adverse shocks during teenage years increase the probability of early marriages and early fertility among women.⇤ We thank Jérôme Adda, Marcella Alsan, Natalie Bau, Caterina Gennaioli, Veronica Guerrieri, Eliana La Ferrara, Costas Meghir, Claudia Olivetti, Michèle Tertilt, Marcos Vera-Hernandez and participants at the workshops at COSME, Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, SED meetings,"Families and the Macroeconomy" in Mannheim, EDePo, and AEA meetings, and at seminars at Stockholm School of Economics, Bocconi and Queen Mary for helpful comments. We are grateful to Helene Bie Lilleør and Sofya Krutikova for useful discussion on the Kagera Health Development Survey and to Kalle Hirvonen for the clarification regarding weather data. Simone Lenzu and Jorge Rodriguez provided outstanding research assistance. This research was partly funded by a Research Grant from the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.† Queen Mary, University of London and IFS. Email: l.corno@qmul.ac.uk ‡ The University of Chicago and NBER. Email: avoena@uchicago.edu. 1The relationship is stronger in villages where bride price payments are typically higher. We use these empirical results to estimate the parameters of our model and isolate the role of the bride price custom for consumption smoothing. In counterfactual exercises, we show that parents heavily rely on child marriages and bride price payments to smooth consumption. Without credit markets, bans on these practices are costly for a daughter's parents. However, ensuring access to credit limits parents' cost, making bans more likely to succeed.

The impact of market integration on arranged marriages in Matlab, Bangladesh

“…There is some evidence that arranged marriages occur at younger ages than non-arranged marriages (Prediction 2), in line with hypotheses derived from parent-offspring conflict theories (Schaffnit, Hassan et al, 2019;Corno and Voena, 2016). However, this result is largely accounted for by the small number of arranged marriages to relatives, which occurred significantly earlier than arranged marriage to non-relatives.…”

“…Parents' and children's interests often align, but parents are expected to prefer marriages that advantage their whole family unit even when there is a potential cost to an individual child (Trivers, 1974;Schaffnit, Hassan et al, 2019). For example, parents may prefer their daughters to marry at younger ages or in times of familial economic need in order to optimise the timing and size of bridewealth or dowry payments (Corno & Voena, 2016;Schaffnit, Hassan et al, 2019). Parents may also prioritise marriages which build advantageous family alliances (Chagnon et al, 2017;Coontz, 2006;Lévi-Strauss, 1949), including, for example, prefering spouses from well-off or high-status backgrounds.…”

Supporting women's empowerment by changing intra‐household decision‐making: A mixed‐methods analysis of a field experiment in rural south‐west Tanzania

“…Bride wealth payments reduce women's bargaining power by deterring women from ending their marriage. Such payments also increase the likelihood of early marriage of women when used for consumption smoothing during income shocks (Corno & Voena, 2016).…”

“…The custom of exchanging bride wealth to the bride's parents is still widely practised (Corno & Voena, 2016; MoHCDGEC, 2017), including in southern Tanzania (Maganga, 2002). Bride wealth payments reduce women's bargaining power by deterring women from ending their marriage.…”

Governing the Interlinkages between the SDGs

“…Owing to patrilocality, the married daughter exits her parents' household, thus reducing the number of economically inactive dependants (Hoogeveen, Klaauw, and Lomwel, 2011). Moreover, in regions where there is an absence of credit markets, early marriages of daughters can act as a consumption-smoothing insurance, as a younger bride is expected to receive a larger marital asset (Corno and Voena, 2016).…”