Preferences and beliefs in the marriage market for young brides

Abstract

Rajasthani women typically leave school early and marry young. We develop a novel discrete choice methodology using hypothetical vignettes to elicit average parental preferences over a daughter's education and age of marriage, and subjective beliefs about the evolution of her marriage market prospects. We find parents have a strong preference for delaying a daughter's marriage until eighteen but no further. Conditional on a marriage match, parents place little intrinsic value on a daughter's education. However, they believe the probability of receiving a good marriage offer increases strongly with a daughter's education but deteriorates quickly with her age on leaving school.

Identification of Ex Ante Returns Using Elicited Choice Probabilities

“…Several studies choose instead to elicit choices in hypothetical (counterfactual) scenarios (e.g. Blass et al, 2010;Bah and Batista, 2018;Wiswall and Zafar, 2018;Maestas et al, 2018;Adams-Prassl and Andrew, 2019;Koşar et al, 2021;Ameriks et al, 2020a,b;Boyer et al, 2020;Fuster and Zafar, 2021). In most cases, the hypothetical scenarios are created by inducing random variations from a baseline scenario that corresponds to the respondent's actual beliefs and characteristics.…”