Female Education, Marital Assortative Mating and Dowry: Theory and Evidence from India

This paper studies the association between female education, marital assortative mating and dowry in India. Literature suggests that marital assortative mating or ‘who marries whom’ is determined by the characteristics of grooms and brides and the respective households. Literature suggests that men choose to marry females with higher education in expectation of greater wage income in future. This paper proposes that in developing economies, characterized by low female labour force participation and poor returns to female education, female years of schooling is a non-monetary rather than a monetary trait. A better educated female brings down the household cost of production and is positively associated to household utility per unit of cost. Education levels of the potential bride on the other hand are negatively associated with dowry payments. A rise in female education would thus have countering effects on the utility of post marital household. A household would find positive assortative mating optimal if the efficiencies in household cost outweighs the fall in dowry with female education. Based on Becker (1991), we propose a basic theoretical model to explain empirical results. The empirical results for India using IHDS-II data suggest that there exists positive assortative mating in marriage based on education. The association however is found to be weaker in dowry prominent districts. There exists substitution in the education levels of bride and dowry. The cost reduction reinforcing effects are stronger than the dowry substitution effect. We derive instrumental variable estimates to address potential endogeneity.