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Journal of Political Economy Vol. 128 No. 2 2020

Bride Price and Female Education

Nava Ashraf1; Natalie Bau2; Nathan Nunn3,4,5; Alessandra Voena4,6

1 London School of Economics and Political Science · 2 University of Toronto · 3 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research · 4 National Bureau of Economic Research · 5 Harvard University Press · 6 University of Chicago

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1086/704572
Volume
128
Issue
2
Pages
591-641
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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