Examining the Role of Dowries in India
Sonia Dalmia, Grand Valley State University
In many traditional societies, the initiation of a marriage is accompanied by some transfer of goods or services. When these transfers are made from brides and their families to grooms and their families, they are broadly classified as dowries. A transfer in the opposite direction--that is, from grooms and their families to brides and their families--is generally called a bride price. The nature of marriage transactions in India has been theoretically linked to the inheritance system. For example, dowry is interpreted as the pre-mortem inheritance of the bride, passed to her at the time of her marriage. Hindu custom historically prohibited women from inheriting land, particularly when there were male heirs. This principle is a part of the Mitakshara tradition of Hindu law, which prevails throughout India except in the states of Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Northern parts of Orissa In India, social norms make it extremely rare for women to receive real (immovable) property. Dowry is subsequently viewed as a pre-mortem inheritance of a female progeny and consists only of movable property (Sharma 1984; Goody 1973).
However, for this view to work, dowry must be the general form of marriage payment and it must represent wealth that stays under the control of the bride. Neither of these prerequisites is completely met throughout India. First, other forms of marriage transactions and marriages involving no payment are statistically preponderant in India (Agarwal, 1995). Second, in many instances, a large part of a woman's dowry does not remain under her control (Miller, 1980). Moreover, dowry does not represent a fixed share of a particular divisible estate; it differs in value and timing from the male inheritance. Dowry for women is linked to marriage (without a marriage there is no dowry) while inheritance for men is not. Most importantly, dowry continues to be given in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in spite of their gender-neutral inheritance laws. Therefore, when considering dowry as a marriage payment, the question remains "What do the bride's parents pay for in the marriage market?"
In this paper I use data on marriage transactions and on the personal and family traits of marital partners, collected from five districts each in the states of Uttar Pradesh (north India) and Karnataka (south India), to develop and test a framework capable of explaining marriage transactions in India. I take the view that marriage transactions "equalize" the value of marriage services exchanged by the households of the bride and the groom. In other words, marital arrangements among households are manifestations of implicit contractual arrangements serving to equalize the imbalances in the value of marriage.
The theory of equalizing differences is particularly suitable for the analysis of marriage markets, once price differences among grooms are recognized as equalizing differences for the alternative bundles of characteristics they possess. The prediction is that, grooms with higher educational qualifications and income earning potential are likely to get higher dowries. Consequently, dowry is a "payment for the establishment of socio-economic alliances valuable to the bride's family," where the value of these alliances to the bride's family is not balanced by a comparable value to the groom's family.
In the empirical investigation of marriage markets, one issue of interest is determining how the price of grooms varies as their characteristics vary. The other subject of interest is estimating structural demand functions for attributes of the grooms; but the absence of directly observable attribute prices poses a problem for such estimation. In a seminal essay, Rosen (1974) proposed a "two-step" procedure whereby attribute prices are estimated first as derivatives of a hedonic price function and these are then used to predict the parameters of household demand functions for attributes. This procedure has since then been used in a number of applications.
Despite the almost universal use of Rosen's modeling strategy, applications have often used inappropriate estimation procedures that give rise to inconsistent estimates of the parameters of demand functions. In the model of implicit marriage markets, the interaction of individual supply and individual demand produces a market clearing function which relates the price of a match to the bundle of characteristics provided by the bride and groom. Rosen proposes that this interaction creates a "garden-variety" identification problem of separating supply from demand. I use the assumption of fixed supply of groom's attributes to solve for this problem. This assumption seems restrictive, however the data support its validity when marriage markets are separated by the education of the bride. This is an important result, as it suggests the existence of separate marriage markets for uneducated and educated brides in India.
Moreover, in estimating the parameters of the demand function for a set of groom characteristics, an identification problem is created by the simultaneity of prices and quantities. An important factor affecting the accuracy of demand estimates is the scale of exogenous marginal price variation in the model. Furthermore, in practical applications, potential measurement errors in the market price structure and in the characteristics selected are also likely to have a significant impact on the accuracy of demand estimates.
By using appropriate instruments for the endogenous attribute prices, I derive consistent parameter estimates in this paper.
The results support the hypothesized, equalizing differences, role of marital arrangements for uneducated brides in the Indian marriage market. Measurable groom characteristics on which compensating price differentials have been shown to arise empirically include groom's age at marriage, education and height. In regions more to the north, dowries were found to be higher. Most importantly, contrary to popular belief, I find that holding groom characteristics constant, real dowries have decreased over time. Finally, in estimating the parameters of the demand functions for set of groom characteristics, my results show that the most important determinants of demand for various groom attributes are price of the attribute, bride's traits, and the socio-economic status of the bride household.
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