Why dowries botticini

My earlier works suggested that dowry can be interpreted as a pre-mortem bequest by a woman's parents to … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 5 excerpts, cites results and background. This paper investigates the effect of the differential pecuniary costs of sons and daughters on fertility decisions.

The focus is on dowries in India, which increase the economic returns to sons and … Expand. View 1 excerpt, cites background. Dowry is a ubiquitous feature of South Asian marriage markets.

However, empirical research on dowry has been limited by the lack of data. We utilize retrospective information on gifts exchanged at … Expand. View 2 excerpts, cites background. Saving for Dowry: Evidence from Rural India. The ancient custom of dowry, that is, bride-to-groom marriage payments, remains ubiquitous in many contemporary societies. This paper examines whether dowry impacted household decision making and … Expand. We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic … Expand.

The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice. Payments between families at the time of marriage have existed throughout the history of most developed countries and are currently pervasive in many areas of the developing world. These payments can … Expand.

We explain trends in dowry levels in Bangladesh by drawing attention to an institutional feature of marriage contracts previously ignored in the literature: mehr or traditional Islamic bride-price. The Economics of Consanguineous Marriages 1. This paper explains consanguineous marriages in developing countries.

Consanguinity is related to dowry, both emerging from incomplete marriage contracts. A theoretical model describes families … Expand. View 1 excerpt.

Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. Ackerberg, Daniel A. Why Dowries? Botticini, Maristella, Siow, Aloysius, Publications Events. Your search terms.

Open Access only. When married daughters leave their parental home and their married brothers do not, altruistic parents provide dowries for daughters and bequests for sons in order to solve a free riding problem between their married sons and daughters.

Unlike the standard economic model, we argue that there is no connection between the disappearance of dowries and the appearance of brideprices. We compare the predictions of our theory vis-a-vis the historical develop- ment of dowries, bequests, brideprices, and marriage gifts in various civiliza- tions of the past.

Our theory of dowries is consistent with narrative evidence from ancient Near Eastern civilizations, ancient Greece, Roman and Byzan- tine empires, western Europe from to AD, the Jews from antiquity to about , Arab Islam from the seventh century to modern times, China, Japan, early-modern England, modern Brazil, and North America.

Some of the predictions of the model are also consistent with quantitative evidence from a unique data set of four thousand marriage contracts and many lega- cies from medieval and early Renaissance Tuscany we gathered at the state archives of Florence. Although it is not the main aim of our this chapter, we also discuss the absence of dowries and the prevalence of brideprices in contemporary African societies.

Lastly, we compare our theory with the re- cent developments of the dowry system in India, where dowries instead of withering seem to become more important. Before presenting the model and discussing the evidence, some additional remarks are in order to clarify the limit of our contribution.

First, we take virilocality as given and proceed in analyzing dowries and bequests under that assumption. Rosenzweig and Wolpin and Guner provide rationales of why agricultural societies are primarily virilocal. Second, our theory has nothing new to say about the equilibrium deter- mination of bridal wealth, a focus of much of the existing literature. We focus on the internal organization of the family whereas most of the existing literature on dowries focuses on how families respond to external shadow prices.

Third and most important, our model provides a particular environment in which dowries emerge endogenously. To the extent that virilocality and the associated free riding concern apply, we expect to see dowries in that society. However, ours is not necessarily the only environment to support dowries. This reward scheme is not needed for married daughters and so they may get dowries.

This chapter summarizes results from Botticini and Siow hereafter BS which contains a comprehensive survey on dowries, extensive citations and proofs of all propositions in this chapter. With some exceptions, many past civilizations characterized by dowries were also virilocal and monogamous; husbands often simultaneously gave marriage 4 Non-economists also consider other models of dowry Goody , , ; Choinackj , ; Hartung ; Klapisch-Zuber ; Schlegel and Eloul ; and Carroll See Harrell and Dickey for a survey.

Ne- olocal defines those marriages in which the groom and the bride live with neither their families. The relative importance of dowries from parents to their daughters and marriage gifts from husbands to their wives greatly varied from time to time.

In some dotal societies, married daughters also received bequests whereas they did not in other societies. Although widespread in isolated communities, dowries were not common in colonial Americas or Australia, while they were being used at the same time in the source countries. Also, dowries are not widespread in contemporary Africa, where brideprices prevail. After marriage, the son continues to live and work with his parents.

After marriage, the daughter leaves her natal household and moves into her parent-in-laws household. The parents have one unit of initial capital to allocate between their two children. Let x be the share of capital allocated to the son. Outsiders, such as a married daughter and her husband, do not have the same family specific skills.

The same argument can apply to crafts and trade activities whenever family specific skills are important in a given business. The qualitative predictions of this model are the same as those in the text. The parents may give to their daughter some of the gross wealth created by the son in the form of a parental bequest.

In contrast, because the married daughter has left home, her parents cannot expropriate and give to the son any of her gross wealth. If he does not receive the entire estate upon the death of his parents, his parents have bequeathed some of his wealth to his sister.

Let b be the share of gross wealth that is retained by him as his inheritance from his parents. Then his net wealth is. In this chap- ter, we assume that there is assortative matching by wealth in the marriage market. When there is positive assortative matching in marriage market equilibrium, h0. His utility from marriage will depend on his own wealth, ws , and the wealth of his spouse, h ws.

Thus his utility is:. Her net wealth is. The qualitative predictions again are similar. For analytic convenience, let her also value her net wealth, wd , with the same indirect utility function U.

Her utility is:. Assuming that parents value the welfare of both their children, let parental utility be:. To analyze the potential conflicts between parents and their children, let Assumption 1. With inequality i , parental utility is higher under allocation A rather than allocation B. That is, he will not work hard if he has to share equally in the bequest with his sister. Thus the second inequality shows the free riding problem between brother and sister.

In the first stage, the parents allocate capital between the children. We will solve for the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of this game. Equilibrium parental utility is:.

Proof: BS. The daughter receives more than a third but less than half of the initial capital as a dowry. The son receives more than three quarters of the estate. In fact, the daughter may receive no bequest. Free riding might explain pri- mogeniture and the custom of cash payments to sons who joined the military or church in some past European societies.

Allocation A generates more utility for the parents. However, due to the strategic behavior of both parents and their children, it is not implementable. Proposition 1 also implies that final net wealth of both the daughter and the son are the same. This implication is due to our assumption, for analytic convenience, that the indirect utility functions for net wealth are the same for both children.

Without disinherit- ing daughters, parents can equate wealth across their children. However, there is a minimum dowry size below which the son will shirk. If daughters are disinherited, parents do not worry about a minimum dowry size but have to deal with the inequality of wealth between their children instead.

We may summarize the above discussion as follows. Bequests to daughters will be smaller than that for sons. Daughters may even be disinherited. However, the size of the bequest to a daughter is not necessarily informative about parental valuation of their daughter and son.

Our theory also explains the timing of the dowry. The inability of the parents not to change bequests after they observe the output of the children is critical. Again, allocation A can be implemented if parents can commit to punishing their son for shirking. Prediction 1: Virilocality and Dowries. In virilocal societies so far apart from each other both geographically and temporally, such as the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, ancient Greece and Rome, the Byzantine empire, the Jews from antiquity to about , Arab Islam, Sung China, India, Japan, and medieval and early modern Europe, we have dowries see Table 1.

There is a negligible number of neolocal societies the bride and groom set up their own household , which have the custom of dowry. According to the ethnographic data from Murdoch , these are the Cheremis of Finnic descent in the s, and the Hutsul eastern Slavs around Nine neolocal cultures have brideprices, and in eight neolocal societies there are no transfers occurring at marriage. The absence of dowries in the Dravidian kinship region in India may be explained by the features of post-marital residence and marriage patterns there.

Moreover, unlike the Hindu marriage pattern, virilocality is not the norm among the Dravidians practicing cross-cousin marriages Karve , 60— Perhaps the most glaring exception to virilocality and dowries is in con- temporary sub-Saharian Africa in which virilocality appears associated with brideprices instead of dowries.

Data on hundreds of cultures we coded from the Ethnographic Atlas by George P. Murdoch confirm this pattern Table 2. How- ever, unlike the past societies described above, which were mostly monoga- mous, most African societies with brideprices are characterized by polygyny Also, seven per- cent of the societies with brideprices and virilocality have collective instead of individual property rights. In this context, dowries cannot exist simply be- cause parents cannot transfer wealth to their children, regardless of gender.

However, whether the exception is due to the polygynous nature of many African societies, the type of agricultural practices as discussed by Boserup, or the lack of private property rights over land or cattle is unclear.

In the Byzantine empire children who moved out of their natal house- holds, regardless of gender, received dowries and were excluded from bequests Laoui , — The same free riding concern may explain why in medieval and early modern England, younger sons who left their natal families to become soldiers or to join the clergy , received cash gifts rather than bequests Gies and Gies , ; Stone and Fawtier Stone In medieval and Renaissance Italy, daughters who became nuns and sons who entered monasteries also received dowries Botticini To mit- igate the disincentives for sons to work hard with their family assets, dowry contracts should not contain any income sharing provision.

Since families may be liquidity constrained and parents worry about the treatment of their married daughter by the in-laws, a dowry contract may be complicated. It may contain deferred payments and state contingent payments. The contract may also contain clauses as to the disposition of the dowry when and how the couple separates.

However, if our explanation is correct, a dowry contract should minimize the sharing of profits generated with the family assets after the bride leaves her natal household. We are able to document this feature of dowry contracts in three societies quite far apart from each other.

Dowry contracts did not have income sharing clauses in ancient Athens Table 3. Dowries consisted of cash, rents of houses, or interest payments from mort- gages. No income sharing was also a characteristic of dowry contracts among the Jewish communities in the Mediterranean, as reported in the documents from the Cairo Geniza Goitein Almost in all documents, the dowry consisted of clothing, bedding, jewelry, copper, and furniture; cash was not a frequent item, while a third of the documents listed houses or portion of houses as part of the dowries.

More systematic evidence is available from medieval and Renaissance Flo- rence, where virilocality was the norm. Table 5 reports data on about four thousand dowry contracts we collected at the states archives of Florence. Most dowries were paid in cash, or consisted of clothing, bedding, and fur- niture. In the thirteenth century, a tiny proportion 0. The proportion increased to 8. In each period, a negligible percentage of contracts contained income sharing clauses. The rarity of income sharing clauses was not due to the lack of knowledge of share contracts.

In both trade and in agriculture, share contracts were well known in medieval and early Renaissance Tuscany Ackerberg and Botticini However, in the context of dowry contracts, income sharing agreements were rare. Of course, dowry contracts helped solve other problems. More than half of the Cortona matched contracts had clauses entailing deferred payments. Based on this wealth of documents, Goitein —88 has written an impressive social and economic history of the Jewish and Arab communities in the Mediterranean from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries.

The absence of income sharing clauses in dowry contracts in past societies is apparently at odds with the evidence on marriage choices and risk sharing from some contemporary developing countries. In such village economies, parents strategically place their daughters in marriage to provide insurance for both families.

However, at a closer look, there is no contradiction between our finding of no income sharing in dowry contracts in past societies and risk sharing through marriage in contemporary India. Prediction 3: Exclusion of Daughters from Bequests.

In virilo- cal societies, daughters will receive most of the wealth transfers from their parents through dowries and not through bequests. Daughters are more likely to receive bequests when there are no brothers. In this case, the free riding problem does not exist and parents make their daughters inherit the family estates.