# **2.2 Construction of** **_Expected Dowry_**

Unlike other data sets, such as the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), that record total marriage expenditure in the year of survey by families _similar_ to the respondent’s family, the 2006 REDS collected data on _actual_ payments by brides and grooms in the surveyed households.<sup>11</sup> Specifically, it recorded the value of gifts received or given at the time of marriage in addition to the year of marriage and demographic information of spouses (e.g., caste and years of schooling) for 17,401 marriages that occurred during 1986-2007.<sup>12</sup> We compute net dowry as the difference between “gross payments by the bride’s family to the groom or his family” and “gross payments by the groom’s family to the bride’s family,” and deflate the nominal amounts using the 2005 national Consumer Price Index.

We plot the distribution of net and gross marriage payments in Figure 1.<sup>13</sup> The proportion of marriages with a negative net dowry, i.e., where the groom’s family paid more to the bride’s family than the other way around, is non-zero, but quite small. The vast majority of the marriages involved positive net dowry payments to the groom’s family. We do not observe any marriages where the value of gifts was reported to be zero.<sup>14</sup> Figure A.1 describes the variation in the dowry variable by year of marriage; the top panel shows the raw data on the real net dowry paid by the bride’s family and the bottom panel displays, separately, the real value of gifts from the bride’s family and from the groom’s family.<sup>15</sup> Ideally, to examine how dowry expectations impact household behavior, we would like selfreported data on how much dowry a family expects to give or receive when their child gets married. Unfortunately, we are unaware of any dataset that has this information. Consequently, we construct a proxy for the true expectations—our _expected dowry_ variable—by assuming that, after a child is born, parents form expectations about the dowry they will pay or receive for their child in the

> 11In addition to the IHDS, other researchers have used dowry data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Status of Women and Fertility (SWAF) surveys. While the ICRISAT data contain retrospective information on marriages, it is only a small survey of 240 households from six villages in three districts of rural South Central India collected in 1983. Although the SWAF survey is relatively new and was conducted in 1993-94, a key shortcoming of it is that it does not report specific dowry amounts and instead provides five ordinal categories that nominal dowries fall into.

> 12The surveys were administered to household heads who provided information on marriages of other household members. Male heads were asked about their non co-resident children, siblings, and non coresident parents, while female heads were asked about their non co-resident children, and the siblings and non co-resident parents of their husband. One omission that 2006 REDS made is not to collect data on dowries received by co-resident sons of the head. However, since a co-resident son would be married to another head’s non-co-resident daughter (typically from the same state and caste given the structure of the Indian marriage market), the dowry information for co-resident sons’ marriages may still be in our data.

> 13See Chiplunkar and Weaver (2017) for documentation of the prevalence and evolution of dowry in India using the 1999 round of REDS.

> 14However, our data do contain marriages with missing information on gifts. A detailed discussion of this issue and how we deal with it is in Appendix C.

> 15We also report the composition of dowries, i.e., the kind of things that are usually given as gifts at the time of a daughter’s marriage, in rural India using the 2004-05 IHDS in Table A.1. This information is not recorded in the REDS data.

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