Marriage is almost universal in India, and so is dowry. Despite being illegal since 1961, most Indian brides’ families pay a substantial amount of cash and gifts to the grooms’ families at the time of marriage, often amounting to several years of household income. Traditionally, dowry was considered stridhan, i.e., woman’s wealth, and it was indeed a type of premortem bequest as daughters typically did not inherit property from their fathers. Over time, however, dowry has become more of a groom-price that equates the supply and demand of brides and grooms in the marriage market.
Despite its wide prevalence, accurate data on dowry is hard to come by. In fact, even simple things such as the definition of dowry and its trend have been hotly debated in the economics literature. In a new paper, my co-authors, Nishith Prakash and Sungoh Kwon from the University of Connecticut, and I use data…
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