UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Essays on Marriage and Education Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sm691hc Author Rubio Covarrubias, Ariana Gabriela Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Essays on Marriage and Education A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Economics by Ariana Gabriela Rubio Covarrubias 2014 c Copyright by Ariana Gabriela Rubio Covarrubias 2014 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Essays on Marriage and Education by Ariana Gabriela Rubio Covarrubias Doctor of Philosophy in Economics University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Adriana Lleras-Muney, Chair In this dissertation I present three papers, each as an individual chapter. The first two papers are in the field of development economics, while the third paper is in the field of education economics. In the first paper, titled \The Love Revolution: Decline in Arranged Marriages in Asia, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa,"documents a striking decline in arranged marriages in Asia, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Arranged marriages have existed in many societies throughout time, they have acted as a mechanism that allows two families to enter into an informal contract (for example, informal insurance arrangements) that will provide benefits to their members: create political alliances, ensure consumption smoothing, facilitate economic transactions, consolidate power, increase wealth, among others. In Europe, they ii disappeared towards the 12th century, remaining popular only among the wealthy class finally disappearing after the Industrial Revolution. In the East (Asia and Africa), they remained to be the most popular marriage institution until the middle of the 20th century. This paper also documents the patterns of the transition, finding that women in arranged marriages tend to live in rural areas, have lower education, belong to agricultural households, and being engaged in non-paid activities. Using these findings I suggest one main hypothesis regarding the causes behind their disappearance: the decline in the net benefits of arranged marriages relative to an (increasing) outside option. I propose and discuss several of economic changes that could lead to shift in this margin: increase in income covariance, change in type of risk, availability of substitutes, increase in asymmetric information and limited commitment, change in bargaining power of children, and alternative explanations related to changes in marriage markets. Finally, I briefly analyze some potential welfare consequences of the transition by focusing on measures of domestic violence. I find that women having an arranged marriages are more prone to support domestic abuse. To understand these patterns, in the second chapter, \How Love Conquered Marriage: Theory and Evidence on the Disappearance of Arranged Marriages," I construct and em- pirically test a model of marital choices that assumes that AM serve as a form of informal insurance for parents and children, whereas other forms of marriage do not. In this model, children accepting the AM will have access to insurance but might give up higher family in- come by constraining their geographic and social mobility. Children in love marriages (LM) are not geographically/socially constrained, so they can look for the partner with higher labor market returns, and they can have access to better remunerated occupations. The model predicts that arranged marriages disappear when the net benefits of the insurance arrangement decrease relative to the (unconstrained) returns outside of the social network. Using consumption and income panel data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), iii I show that consumption of AM households does not vary with household income (while con- sumption of LM households does), consistent with the model's assumption that AM provides insurance. I then empirically test the main predictions of the model. I use the introduction of the Green Revolution (GR) in Indonesia as a quasi-experiment. First, I show that the GR increased the returns to schooling and lowered the variance of agricultural income. Then, I use a difference-in-difference identification strategy to show that cohorts exposed to the GR experienced a faster decline in AM as predicted by the theoretical framework. Second, I show the existence of increasing divorce rates among couples with AM as their insurance gains vanish. Finally, using the exogenous variation of the GR, I find that couples having an AM and exposed to the program were more likely to divorce, consistent with the hypothesis of declining relative gains of AM. The third paper, titled \Peer feedback and teaching performance: A Randomized Con- trolled Trial," is a first step towards determining whether trained peer feedback has a causal effect on the teaching performance of teaching assistants (TA). The participants of the in- tervention were the TAs of the Department of Economics of a large public university for one academic quarter. We analyzed the students' evaluations of these TAs, for the quarter in which the intervention took place and the following quarter, as well as the students' raw grades for the intervention quarter. The results show an effect of almost one half of a stan- dard deviation for the students' TA evaluations in the quarter following the intervention. The detailed analysis of the dimension of the evaluations suggests that the intervention had a large effect on the TAs' communication skills, and a more modest effect on the following aspects: concern, organization, concern and interaction. Nonethless, the intervention had no effect in the concurrent quarter, suggesting that it takes time for TAs to adjust their teaching practices. iv The dissertation of Ariana Gabriela Rubio Covarrubias is approved. Leah Michelle Platt Boustan Paola Giuliano Kathleene M. McGarry Adriana Lleras-Muney, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 v Dedicated to my parents, with all my love and admiration. vi Table of Contents 1 The Love Revolution: Decline in Arranged Marriages in Asia, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa 1 1.1 Introduction....................................1 1.2 Evidence from Anthropology and the Economics of Arranged Marriages . .3 1.2.1 Anthropological and Ethnographic Evidence on Arranged Marriages .3 1.2.2 Economics of Marriage and Kinship in Developing Countries . .6 1.3 The Patterns in Arranged Marriages . 10 1.3.1 Arranged Marriages in Europe and America . 10 1.3.2 Arranged Marriages in Asia and Africa . 13 1.3.3 Patterns of the transition . 14 1.3.4 Evidence from other studies . 19 1.4 The Causes of the Transition . 22 1.4.1 Changes in incentives of Parents . 24 1.4.1.1 Decrease in the value of insurance and other economic links 24 1.4.1.2 Increase in the cost of insurance . 27 1.4.2 Changes in the incentives of Children . 29 1.4.3 Other explanations . 30 1.5 Welfare consequences . 32 1.6 Conclusions . 36 1.7 TablesandFigures ................................ 38 1.8 References . 55 2 How Love Conquered Marriage: Theory and Evidence on the Disappear- vii ance of Arranged Marriages 63 2.1 Introduction.................................... 63 2.2 Literature Review . 69 2.3 StylizedFacts ................................... 76 2.4 TheModel..................................... 77 2.4.1 One-child Model: Setup . 79 2.4.2 Analysis and Discussion . 81 2.4.3 Extending the Model to Include Divorce . 84 2.4.4 Extending the Model to Two Children . 86 2.5 Empirical Results . 91 2.5.1 Test of Full Insurance . 91 2.5.1.1 Data............................... 93 2.5.1.2 Results . 95 2.5.2 The Indonesian Green Revolution . 97 2.5.2.1 The Bimas/Inmas Program . 97 2.5.2.2 The Effects of the Green Revolution on Labor Market Outcomes 99 2.5.2.3 Effect on Arranged Marriages and Education . 104 2.5.2.4 Robustness Checks . 108 2.5.2.5 Additional Prediction: Divorce . 111 2.5.3 Other countries: Divorce in Turkey . 115 2.6 Discussion . 117 2.7 Proofs and Other Extensions . 121 2.7.1 Proposition 1 . 121 2.7.2 Extending the Model to Include Divorce . 125 2.7.3 Proposition 3 . 128 2.7.4 Size of the network and the number of children . 132 viii 2.7.5 Data Section . 134 2.8 TablesandFigures ................................ 136 2.9 References . 183 3 Peer Feedback and Teaching Performance: A Randomized Controlled Trial192 3.1 Introduction.................................... 192 3.2 Literature Review . 196 3.3 Experimental Design . 200 3.3.1 Experimental Design . 200 3.3.2 Recruitment Process . 203 3.4 Descriptive Statistics and Results . 204 3.4.1 Descriptive Statistics and Comparison of Means . 205 3.4.2 Regression Analysis . 209 3.4.3 Decomposition of TA evaluations . 213 3.5 Complementary Analyses . 216 3.5.1 Qualitative Survey . 216 3.5.2 Discussion of Potential Future Interventions . 218 3.6 Conclusions . 220 3.7 TablesandFigures ................................ 222 3.8 References . 248 ix List of Figures 1.1 Percentage of Love Marriages by Urban and Rural Areas for all cohorts: China, Thailand, Malaysia and Pakistan . 50 1.2 Percentage of Love Marriages by Schooling Level: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey....................................... 50 1.3 Odd Ratios and Regression Coefficients for Taiwan, Thailand, China and In- donesia....................................... 51 2.1 Arranged Marriages by Cohort and Region . 136 2.2 Arranged Marriages and Education by Cohort . 137 2.3 Arranged Marriages and Years of Schooling within Cohort: Geographic Vari- ation within Country . 138 2.4 Arranged Marriages and Female Employment . 141 2.5 Arranged Marriages and Percentage of Non-Agricultural Households . 142 2.6 Arranged Marriages by Cohort and Residence . 143 2.7 Plotting Residuals of Treatment Intensity . 144 2.8 Arranged Marriages by Cohort of Birth and Treatment Intensity . 145 2.9 Divorce Trends Indonesia . 156 2.10 Percentage of Woman having an Arranged Marriage by Year of Marriage in Turkey......................................