The Effect of Skewed Sex Ratio on Marriage Markets in India

THE EFFECT OF SKEWED SEX RATIOS ON MARRIAGE MARKETS IN INDIA
May 10, 2010 Riah Forbes Economics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 [e-mail] under the direction of Prof. Anjini Kochar ABSTRACT This paper will explore how the declining sex ratio in Haryana, a state in north India, has affected the local marriage market. The ratio of the number of women to men has been falling over time, due to the strong preference for sons and prevalence of sex-selective abortion in this region. Studies show that lower sex ratios lead to higher female bargaining power, but I empirically show that there has been no change in female bargaining power in the region surveyed. I argue that the relative shortage of women causes a squeeze in the marriage market, which has two potential consequences: (i) an increasing age difference between spouses and (ii) an increased geographical spread of the marriage market. I test these hypotheses using primary data collected from households in three districts in Haryana. I conclude that the declining sex ratio has no effect on spousal age gap, but does increase the distance traveled by wives for marriage. This could explain the unresponsiveness of female bargaining power to the sex ratio change, since the marriage market is simply expanding geographically to compensate for the shortage of women rather than by directly altering intra-household dynamics.

Keywords: marriage market, Haryana, sex ratio, bargaining power, India, assortative matching

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my advisor Anjini Kochar for her invaluable advice, guidance and patience over this two-year project, the Rai Foundation for assisting us with logistics in the villages and Geoffrey Rothwell for his advice about the Economics honors program. I would also like to thank Teresa Molina, Lorra de la Paz, Rebecca Schindel and Sze Suen for all their help, and Salone Kapur and Shruti Tibrewala for keeping me sane over the last few months. Finally, I would like

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