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Daughters, Dowries, Deliveries: The Effect of Marital Payments on Fertility Choices in India

09 December 2014, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm

Marco Alfano (UCL Economics)…

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Room 432, SSEES, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW
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Marco Alfano (UCL Economics)

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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 decrease the returns to daughters. 

The paper exploits an exogenous shift in the cost of girls relative to boys arising from a revision in anti-dowry law. The reform is found to have attenuated the widely documented positive correlation between daughters and their parents’ fertility. The observed patterns can be explained by a simple model of sequential fertility decisions where the gender composition of children determines future dowry payments.

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Marco Alfano is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics, University College London, and is based in the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration. Marco read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford and obtained an MSc in Economics at the London School of Economics. During his doctoral studies at the University of Warwick he worked as an intern at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Health Organization. From 2009 onwards, he has been a consultant for The World Bank working in the human development network. Marco’s research interests are development economics, economics of the family, health economics and applied micro econometrics.