سرمایه انسانی ارزش مادی عروس برای داماد: برخی از شواهد تجربی

This paper examines the effect of female human capital endowment on the groom price or dowry by using a newly available data set that was created by surveying the middle-class residents of Patna, Bihar. The estimates based on the OLS and 2SLS suggest the existence of positive association between the two variables for the sample under study. The result can be viewed as a positive; albeit, a small step towards settling the issue as to whether or not dowry is an obstacle to female human capital formation.

The main objective of this paper is to examine the association between female dowry and her level of human capital endowment by using a newly created data set from Patna, the capital city of the state of Bihar in North India. Dowry is an ancient practice where bride’s family voluntarily gives gifts to the groom’s family at the time of marriage. In the modern context, however, dowry is invariably treated as a groom’s price for agreeing to marry the bride (see for example, Rao, 2007). There are several papers that theoretically discuss how dowry or groom price is determined (see for example Rao, 1993, Sen, 1998, Anderson, 2003 and Mukherjee and Mondal, 2006). A number of these papers underscore the importance of human capital in determining the amount of dowry. For instance, Sen (1998) in her theoretical paper argues that “the differences in gains from marriage for men and women that lead to dowry arise primarily from differences in patterns of acquisition of human capital”. Empirically, the effect of bride’s human capital endowment on the amount of dowry has been estimated by Rao (1993) among others. Rao uses schooling difference (wife’s education minus husband’s education) as one of the determinants of the amount of dowry and finds a negative association. Using the same data set, Edlund (2000) by regressing the net amount of dowry on the husband and wife’s individual traits including educational attainments confirms a positive association to exist between the two variables. However, the relationship is not statistically significant at the conventional levels in either study. This paper, also, confirms the existence of a positive association; albeit, in a statistically significant manner, by using a newly available data set on dowry from the residents of Patna. This study should be considered an improvement over the previous studies, as it relies on a much more informative household level data, and is also able to control for the endogeneity biases associated with some of the explanatory variables in the estimation of dowry present in the previous studies. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 constructs a simple model of dowry to generate a hypothesis pertaining to the association between female dowry and the level of her human capital acquisition. Section 3 outlines the econometric strategy. Section 4 describes the data and presents summary statistics. Section 5 presents the results of the OLS model. Section 6 conducts various robustness checks including endogeneity and sample selection biases and presents the results of the 2SLS model. Section 7 discusses the limitations of the paper. Section 8 concludes the paper.

The link between dowry and female human capital formation is considered an important issue in the field of gender and economic development. Unfortunately, due to the lack of pertinent data set, the issue has received little attention from the scholars. This paper examines the issue by employing a newly created data set by surveying the residents of Patna, the capital city of the north Indian state of Bihar. This study confirms a positive relationship to exist between the magnitude of female dowry and her level of human capital acquisition. The main result of this paper should be viewed as a positive contribution towards settling a very important issue, namely, whether or not dowry is an obstacle to female human capital formation.