 Today I'll be talking about bride price and the well-being of women. This is joint work with Nathan Nunn at Harvard University So in this book chapter that you've heard a lot about this book so far What we do is study a particular cultural practice. So the payment of bride price So this is defined as a transfer of money or goods from the groom or the groom's family to the bride's family at the time of marriage Often the amounts of the bride price paid are quite large So you should think in excess of a year's income and it's widespread throughout a lot of the world but in particular in sub-Saharan Africa and Today I'll be focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo Just a brief sort of bit of information on bride price So it's often associated with the practice of patrilineal kinship when you trace lineage and inheritance through male members In particular when you practice patrilocal marriage Which means basically that upon marriage women leave their household and move to their husband's household And the idea then is that the bride price is meant to compensate her family for the loss of labor that she would otherwise be supplying And at least in the setting where I work in without the payment of bride price Marriages are often not considered legitimate. So you are considered married upon this transfer of money and goods For those of you who are interested in finding out how much your bride price might be there's a lot of them online bride price calculators which I've done one thing that I was alarmed to see is that You'll notice that usually you get more education than your bride price will be higher I'm in trouble because I pay a penalty for having a PhD. So I guess that means I'm a good deal now I don't know but Just for fun if you're interested in checking it out This is a photo from a bride price ceremony that I attended in Congo for one of my colleagues So basically he's here. He's looking very sullen, but I promise it was actually a very like fun event And what was happening at the time was basically his parents and extended family were meeting with representatives of her family and Negotiating the bride price. I think in actuality This had already all been discussed, but it's part of sort of the the ritual and then in the end It was a big like party. So just to give you a sense of how this is practiced So why study bride price wise is something we're interested in well There's been some growing criticism of the practice So I think Oftentimes when I talk about bride price particularly in the United States for example people focus on the transactional nature of it So the idea is that you're exchanging money for women and that that's somehow going to be bad and then sort of There's evidence at least From focus group interviews that maybe husbands feel they can mistreat their wives if they have paid for them So this is from interviews in Uganda Others argue that bride price may actually trap women into marriages because sometimes you have to repay the bride price if you Want to leave a spouse that's mistreating you So as a result then Ugandan courts have outlawed these repayment upon divorce practice and then there's some work in economics that suggests that Bride price payments may actually incentivize early marriage of your daughter So if your household faces a negative income shock then you may have your daughter get married earlier Then you might have otherwise so that you can receive the bride price payment So see there's some of the examples of why there's been some skepticism around the role of this particular practice however To date there's actually not a lot of systematic evidence on the relationship between bride price amounts and Various outcomes so there's anecdotal evidence, but there's really not a lot of data That has been analyzed and so at least for Anthropologists who describe this practice. It's really not about a transaction It's about a signal from the groom's family to the bride's family that you value your wife or your future wife And that you're thanking her family for all the investments they've made in her And then it's also just how people understand the concept of marriage at least in the place I'm working is that this is a really important part of it So without this transfer you're not married in fact So my my co-author is married and so the first question we get in focus groups is like how much bride price Did he pay for his wife and they're shocked and appalled to learn that he has not paid so All right, so what do we do in this study? We're going to use data from couples in the Democratic Republic of Congo The sample size is much less impressive than in the last presentation, but you know work with what you've got and What we'll do is just look at a bunch of simple correlations between The amount of bride price paid and then these various outcomes that we might care about so for example age of marriage number of children whether or not men and women accept domestic violence Various indicators of the quality of marriage and then one that I like in particular is just how happy are you and in general And so this is just a pretty simple exercise looking at the correlation between bride price amount and then these outcomes So historically in Congo, there's actually quite a lot of variation in the type of Payments made upon marriage So One thing to note then is that customs have changed over time. So I work in this region over here and Historically a lot of people didn't pay bride price. There was actually either Like forms of dowry, but then what happens is there's been a convergence to this payment of bride price but the size of the bride price varies as does the transfer direction so whether it's from the wife's family or to the husband's family Presently it will all be to the wife's family, but And just the work we've done suggests that it's still very important practice So one quote I like is bride price is important for African women, but for Congolese in particular It expresses the love a husband has for his wife. The bride price symbolizes a reward and an honor That's from a Congolese woman One man says the bride price is how a man honors his wife But then he also notes that it's a guarantee that prevents the woman's family from taking her back when there's a dispute So this sort of reflects some of the tensions that might be present in this practice So the data was collected in Kananga Which is in the center of the Democratic Republic of Congo the capital of Kasai central province There's many different ethnic groups represented in the city This is part of a broader project looking at how structure of kinship systems so matrilineal relative to patrilineal kinship systems effects spousal cooperation But as part of that project I collected data on these bride price amounts This is to give you a sense of where individuals in the sample are from so the red dot is where I worked But people come from all over sort of the surrounding areas So you're getting quite a lot of variation and I think background and cultural practice These are the summary statistics from the sample. So a couple things to note is that Age at marriage varies in the sense that men tend to get married older Which kind of makes sense because they actually have to save money in order to pay this bride price and My sample is relatively highly educated and this is again probably a product of the fact that I'm in an urban environment And so in order to measure The amount of the bride price paid men and women were asked at the time of marriage What was the total value of cash and goods that were transferred from the wife's family to the groom's family? It's actually quite difficult to get a very precise estimate of the value of the goods because It's paid partially in cash sometimes in animals such as goats food household goods clothing and So just given that it was difficult to get precise estimates we would have people choose between various sort of categories So this gives you a sense of the distribution of how much money was paid For bride price so of the modal amount is between 250 and 500 US dollars And So the first exercise that we do in the paper is try to understand What determines the amount of money paid and the bride price? So the basic idea being are there particular characteristics of the woman that predict how much the bride price will be? and again, these are all just correlations so The most robust predictor of the amount of money paid is the years of education of the woman So women with more years of education on average are going to be receiving higher bride price amounts Are their family receives higher bride price amounts? And this is consistent with this idea of rewarding investment in the wife And there's no significant differences across rural individuals from rural areas are from the city I work in Nor was there evidence within the data inflation over time though. We were also working with these pretty blunt categories and so We don't need to spend too much time on this But here's the sort of regression that we'll be estimating for the following tables basically looking at the relationship between the amount of bride price paid and the outcomes I described earlier controlling for a set of wife-level characteristics husband-level characteristics and then couple-level characteristics like when they were married and where they were married And so the caveat here is that this is going to be correlations We don't have any sort of random variation and the amount of bride price paid so It may be that the bride price amount is capturing some other effects that we're not measuring here So it could just be that higher quality husbands for example can pay higher bride prices or women who have more supportive families more aggressively negotiate a higher bride price and then we're capturing those effects, but we can't really speak to that here So the first outcome we look at given concerns about this Incentability that it incentivizes early marriage of daughters is just agent marriage So what's the effect of the bride price amount on the age of marriage? And we we find no sort of evidence that there's a correlation between the bride price amount and age of marriage We then look at fertility so the number of children you have Again Partially because you might be getting married earlier you may also then be having more children and again We don't really find any Robust evidence of there being a strong correlation between the bride price amount and number of children I think Also quite interesting is we ask a series of questions on Domestic violence, so these are the same questions that are asked in the demographic and health surveys data On whether or not violence is justified in a variety of situations So this includes whether or not your wife goes out without the husband's permission whether she neglects the children argues with the husband refuses sex or burns the food and People ask whether or not they agree or disagree that domestic violence would be appropriate in these various situations And then we construct an index with these responses And what I think is particularly interesting is that at least for women whose husbands paid higher bride price They're much less likely to believe that domestic violence is acceptable The same doesn't hold for men So there's no real relationship between the bride price amount and men's views on domestic violence But there's some suggestion that women whose husbands paid more money are also holding views that are more consistent with having less domestic violence We also try to measure marriage quality if anyone knows how to actually measure that let me know but We ask respondents how often they engage in a variety of activities with their spouse such as laughing together discussing feelings, I guess if that was required of all partners maybe there'd be fewer divorces, but People answer from never to more than once a day and again We construct an index on how often you engage in these activities that we probably consider to be positive I personally enjoy receiving gifts. So And what we find is that higher bride price amounts are actually correlated with Participating more frequently in these different activities that we might think of as positive or signals of a higher quality of relationship But again, this isn't a causal estimate. These are just correlations and this may be capturing other sort of things that are happening in the background And then we also ask respondents how happy they are So between very happy or very unhappy and very happy Sadly sort of on average people in my sample aren't very happy But women whose husbands paid higher bride prices are happier So if we sort of take this happiness measure as capturing anything meaningful then something and These women's marriages or in their lives is on average better to them Um, finally the last sort of question that we ask in the paper is What are the effects of having to pay the bride price back if the marriage dissolves so often if They've had children then this repayment of bride price isn't required but Sometimes it still is and then certain percentage of it has to be repaid And so there's this argument that this repayment may trap women in marriages that they don't want to be in And so what we do and I won't present the table here is just look at What is the effect of having to repay on women's self-reported happiness? And how does that vary based on the size of the bride price that their husband paid and what we do find is that in general There's no effect of having to repay except for women whose husbands paid very high bride prices Then there seems to be a negative effect on women's self-reported happiness Suggesting that for these very extreme values of bride price payments. It may have an effect on Women's happiness in the marriage So Quickly summarize we find that bride price amount is correlated with the wives education level less acceptance of domestic violence for women higher quality marriage across a variety of different indicators and Greater happiness for women We don't find any evidence that the bride price is associated with earlier marriage or higher fertility But again, this is just correlations in this particular area of Congo One one interesting paper to note is there's Some causal evidence on what happens when you roll out expansion to schooling so you make schooling more available And I'll show off at all find basically that in areas where families practice bride price you get a greater response From those families and sending their girls children to school Then you do in places that don't practice bride price suggesting that it may actually really work as an incentive for sending children to school So in summary Just wanted in this chapter to give an overview of some of these basic correlations between bride price and and a variety of outcomes We might care about if we're interested in the well-being of women Certainly, there's quite a lot of work to be done to more rigorously understand what the effects of bride price are and Sort of this work is part of a broader agenda trying to understand how variation in cultural practices such as kinship system bride price age sets Matter for economic development