Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15754
Authors: Rossella Calvi; Ajinkya Keskar
Abstract: We study the relationship between dowries - wealth transfers from the bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage - and individual-level poverty in rural India. Based on the estimates of a collective household model, we show that the share of household consumption expenditure allocated to a woman is strongly associated with the dowry she paid at the time of her marriage. We compute poverty rates separately for women and men and find that women's poverty relative to men decreases with dowry. Moreover, women who paid dowries are less likely to be poor relative to women who did not, even when their households' consumption expenditures are the same. Our counterfactual policy analysis indicates that abolishing or reducing dowries (through anti-dowry laws or taxes, for example) may have the unintended effect of aggravating intra-household inequality and increasing women's risk of living in poverty after marriage.
Keywords: dowry; resource shares; collective model; intrahousehold inequality; India; poverty
JEL Codes: D13; I32; J12; J16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| higher dowry payments (J12) | a woman's resource share in household consumption (D13) |
| women who paid dowries (J12) | less likely to be poor (I32) |
| not paying a dowry (J12) | more likely to be allocated consumption expenditures below the poverty line (I32) |
| absence of dowry payments (J12) | likelihood of being impoverished after marriage increases (J12) |
| taxing dowry payments (H87) | widen the gender poverty gap (F63) |
| full enforcement of dowry prohibition law (J12) | exacerbate poverty risks for women, men, and children (F63) |