# **B Sample-selection Criteria**

In this appendix, we describe our REDS sample selection criteria and the reasons why we need to impose them. First note that we do not have panel data on household savings. We only know how much a household saved during the year before the survey. To test if households are saving to finance future dowry for their children, we therefore need to focus on households that have unmarried individuals at the time of survey. Out of 8,659 households in our REDS data, we drop 2,089 households that either have no unmarried member or the unmarried members are all older than 18.<sup>44</sup> We drop households where the unmarried individuals are older than 18 as these individuals are likely to be off the marriage market in our context, i.e., rural India. This leaves us with 6,570 households that have at least one unmarried member who is 18 years of age or younger.

Next, to implement our identification strategy, we need to identify firstborn children. REDS does not report the birth order of household members, so we impute it by first linking individuals with their mothers and then assigning birth order by ranking siblings by age. We can only identify an individual’s mother (and hence his/her siblings) if the mother resides in the same household. Therefore, we drop 406 households where the mother of a household member in our sample is not co-resident (e.g., because she might have died). This leaves us with 6,164 households.

Among this sample, there are 727 households where multiple mothers and their children are present. Essentially, these are non-nuclear families (e.g., two brothers living together with their spouses and children) and, as such, they comprise multiple firstborn children from different mothers. We drop these from our sample because our outcome variable (savings) is only available at the household level, whereas one of the key explanatory variables (sex of the firstborn child) varies at the sub-household level in non-nuclear families. The reasoning underlying our estimation strategy does not apply in case of non-nuclear families that have multiple earners and multiple parent-child combinations. Financial decision-making in joint families may be very different, and to that extent our findings about savings and labor supply do not apply to joint households.

This leaves us with 5,437 households where all unmarried under-18 individuals have the same mother. Next we assign birth order by ranking siblings in terms of their age. However, this ranking will be biased if the firstborn is dead. So, we utilize mother interviews where they were asked if their first child is alive and, if alive, they were asked about the age of the oldest living child. Thus we cannot identify a firstborn child in our data if he/ she is not alive at the time of survey. We also drop households if the age of the oldest child reported by the mother does not match the age of any individual in the household roster<sup>45</sup> or if there are multiple firstborn children for the same mother (23 households). This leaves us with 3,365 households.

Lastly, we drop 476 households where the interview was conducted in years other than 2008 to prevent any resulting bias due to omitted time trends or differential implementation of the survey.

> 44The legal minimum age at marriage for women in India is 18.

> 45Note that this also means that we are excluding households where the firstborn child is not co-resident. Unfortunately, we have no way to identify such children in the data.

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