"Do Men Pay For Fertility?" (May-You-Be-the-Mother-of-a-Hundred-Sons Blogging)
Ted Miguel and I want to sell Raj Arunachalam as high as we can on this year's economics Ph.D. job market:
Raj Arunachalam and Suresh Naidu (2006), "Do Men Pay For Fertility? Marriage Market Effects of a Family Planning Experiment in Bangladesh":
We construct a model of the marriage market in which prospective mates consider the outcome of intrahousehold bargaining over fertility. We show that as the price of controlling fertility falls, brides' families compensate men to attract their daughters into marriage. We test the model using retrospective data from the highly-successful Matlab family-planning experiment in Bangladesh in the 1970s. Our difference-in-differences estimator finds that the Metlab program more than doubled bride family-to-groom family marital transfers (i.e. dowry). Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that each additional expected birth reduced dowry by approximately 45%. Our results suggest that marital institutions may dampen the welfare benefits of family planning for women.
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/econ/grad/d.cvs/arunachalam.pdf
Economic History Lunch, Evans 597, October 27, 2006.
