society, although 30 percent of the population reports being landless. Despite a growing emphasis on education and increasing contact with urban areas, the society remains relatively traditional and religiously conservative (Fauveau, 1994).

# 4.1 Preliminary Descriptive Statistics

For the purpose of understanding the incidence of consanguinous marriage in the MHSS data, we rely on the section of the survey that asked men and women retrospective information about their marriage histories. In the sample of ever-married men, information was available on 4,627 marriages and in the sample of ever-married women, information was available on 6,001 marriages. These marriages included not only current marriages, but also past marriages if applicable. We stress therefore the reliability of the marriage data in the survey which permits us to understand changes in this society over time.<sup>21</sup> There were 20 percent of ever-married women who reported marrying a relative (either a fi rst-cousin or any other relative, presumably a second-cousin).<sup>22</sup> These included 22 percent of Muslim women, and 3 percent of Hindu women. These numbers are comparable to the estimates from the Indian NFHS which were previously discussed, and which provide a valuable comparison with Bangladesh’s neighbor, India. For the sample as a whole, the most popular forms of consanguineous marriage were to fi rst cousins on both the mother’s and father’s sides. There were 662 women (11 percent of all marriages) who had married a fi rst-cousin.

Our fi rst step in exploring the determinants of fi rst-cousin marriage in this population involves a comparison of circumstances at marriage through simple descriptive statistics of retrospective information on socioeconomic status at the time of marriage. We examine four different types of marriages: marriages between unrelated individuals, marriages between fi rst-cousins, marriages between relatives other than fi rst-cousins and marriages between non-relatives in the same village. The differences between these different types of marriages can shed light on how “substitutable” different forms of social capital are, and thus help us isolate the extent to which kinship alone affects the nature of a marriage contract.

We fi rst consider the sample of 5607 married women between the ages of 15 and 60 at the time of the survey. Table 1 Panel (A) presents information on the various determinants of the types of marriages under consideration. First, although there is no difference in the age at menarche for the four types of women, those women who marry their fi rst-cousins tend to do so when they are on average a year younger than women who marry non-relatives in different villages, while women who marry relatives do so when they are on average a year older. Second, women who marry their fi rstcousins and/or relatives other than fi rst-cousins are about 10 percentage points less likely to bring a dowry at the time of marriage. This suggests that the reduced dowry afforded by a consanguineous marriage may have been an important consideration in the decision to marry a relative (as tested further below). Third, women who marry fi rst-cousins, relatives other than fi rst-cousins, and women who marry non-relatives within the village, have about a third and half a year less schooling than their counterparts who marry non-relatives outside of the village. Fourth, though their fathers are slightly more likely to have attended school, they are less likely to own farmland.

> <u>21</u> There were 15 percent of men and only about 7 percent of women who reported that they have had more than one marriage. This difference is driven by the fact that while divorced and widowed men typically remarry, most women in these same circumstances do not (Joshi, 2004).

> 22 11 percent of all marriages were marriages to fi rst-cousins.

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