Marriage Payments and Wife's Welfare: All you need is love. Rozenn Hotte and Sylvie Lambert ∗ May 18, 2020 Abstract Bride price is essential to marriage in West Africa and particularly in Senegal where, ac- cording to our data, transfers to the family of the bride characterize about 85% of marriages. The relationship between the bride price and the well-being of the wife in her household has scarcely been studied in West Africa. Furthermore, the simultaneous existence of other marriage payments, flowing in different directions between the stakeholders is also largely ignored. To assess the significance of these marital transfers for women's well-being in Sene- gal, we use a unique survey that enquires separately about the different marriage payments. We highlight the strength of the link between what is given to the bride herself and her welfare, contrary to the looseness of the relation with what is given to the family. JEL Classification: J12, J16, 055 Keywords: Bride-Price, Marriage, Women, Senegal. ∗Contact information: Rozenn Hotte: THEMA-Universit´ede Cergy-Pontoise,
[email protected]; Sylvie Lambert: Paris School of Economics, INRAE,
[email protected]. We are grateful to Richard Akresh, Catherine Guirkinger, Dominique van de Walle and Roberta Ziparo for detailed comments and to participants at Paris School of Economics seminar and CSAE 2018 for insightful discussions. 1 1 Introduction In Senegal, marriage is nearly universal for women, and the social pressure to be married is extremely strong. Marriage and motherhood are important components of their social status and an essential part of their lives.