Preferences and Beliefs in the Marriage Market for Young Brides 1,3 2, 3 Abi Adams and Alison Andrew ∗ 1Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2Department of Economics, University College London 3Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies, Institute for Fiscal Studies Abstract Rajasthani women typically leave school early and marry young. We develop a novel discrete choice method- ology 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 fnd 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 ofer increases strongly with a daughter’s education but deteriorates quickly with her age on leaving school. JEL Codes: J12; J16; I26. ∗Email addresses:
[email protected] and alison
[email protected]. We thank Nava Ashraf, Orazio Attanasio, Oriana Bandiera, James Banks, Teodora Boneva, Rachel Cassidy, Rachel Grifth, Willemien Kets, Sonya Krutikova, Hamish Low, Costas Meghir, Francisco Oteiza, Aureo de Paula, Imran Rasul, Gabriela Smarrelli, Anna Stansbury and Marcos Vera-Hernandez for helpful comments and feedback. We are enormously grateful to Abhishek Gautam, Hemlata Verma, Ronak Soni and Amit Kumar for invaluable support in developing and piloting this instrument and to Kuhika Seth for collecting insightful qualitative data. We would like to thank the Centre for Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the John Fell Fund, University of Oxford for generous fnancial support.