Bride Price and Female Education

By Nava Ashraf, N. Bau, Nathan Nunn, Alessandra Voena. Journal of Political Economy, 2020

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We document an important consequence of bride price, a payment made by the groom to the bride’s family at marriage. Revisiting Indonesia’s school construction program, we find that among ethnic groups without the custom, it had no effect on girls’ schooling. Among ethnic groups with the custom, it had large positive effects. We show (theoretically and empirically) that this is because a daughter’s education, by increasing the amount of money parents receive at marriage, generates an additional incentive for parents to educate their daughters. We replicate these findings in Zambia, a country that had a similar large-scale school construction program.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1313b361d730fdd87546e0cbdf40c03fc94d97e6

Citations in the corpus

• When the money runs out: Do cash transfers have sustained effects on human capital accumulation? (2016, unknown): “8 add to the literature on the effects of human capital accumulation and increased age at marriage on marriage market outcomes (Anderson and Bidner 2015; Ashraf et al. 2015; Field and Ambrus 2008).”