While the human capital variables did not have clear predictions, husband's<sup>schooling</sup> has an interesting impact on violence. A one year increase in the mean<sup>value of husband's</sup> schooling increases the risk of violence by almost four per cent. This suggests<sup>that the positive</sup> effects of schooling on violence - by raising the transfer the wife's family<sup>is willing to give and by</sup> raising the husband's gains to marriage, dominate the negative effect -<sup>increasing the husband's</sup> welfare after separation. None of the other variables have significant effects.

To think about the policy implications of these results, it is important to appreciate<sup>the</sup> extent to which most Indian women do not have options outside of marriage.<sup>Marriage, for</sup> women, is never a matter of choice but is almost entirely driven by<sup>social norms and the</sup> preferences of parents. Consequently, the burden of any adversity in the marriage<sup>market, or</sup> within a marriage after it has been arranged, is almost exclusively borne by<sup>the wife or bride. As</sup> other work has demonstrated, it is in this context that a shortage of grooms in<sup>the marriage market</sup> causes dowries to rise substantially. If it were possible for a woman<sup>to opt to marry at a much</sup> later age, or choose not to marry at all, or to divorce her husband if the marriage were unsatisfactory, dowries would not rise, though the number of single or divorced<sup>women might.</sup> Thus, providing opportunities for women outside marriage and the marriage market would significantly improve their well-being by allowing them to leave an abusive husband, by finding a way of "bribing" him to stop the abuse, or by presenting a credible threat that<sup>achieves</sup> the same objective. In more specific terms, the main opportunities for women outside the marriage market would be in the labor market. Policies that invest in the hulman capital of women could make a difference but would be more effective if job opportunities<sup>for women were</sup> also provided. Thus, income-generation programs and micro-lending strategies<sup>focused on</sup> women could be of great value.

To conclude, in this case-study we have demonstrated that violence can<sup>be used as an</sup> instrument to redistribute resources. The example we focus on is the highly publicized<sup>link</sup> between the marriage market and wife-abuse in the Indian sub-continent. lTo<sup>examine this, we</sup> employ an approach that combines the usual methods of economics with ethnographic<sup>techniques</sup> borrowed from anthropology. We construct a non-cooperative bargaining and<sup>signaling model of</sup> dowries and domestic violence which is informed by the ethnographic evidence. Predictions from this models are tested with survey data gathered from the same population examined<sup>in the</sup> in-depth interviews. We find that for the most part the econometric evidence is consistent<sup>with</sup> the theory. In Probit-IV estimates of violence we find that husbands<sup>are mrore likely to beat their</sup> wives when the wife's family is rich because there are more resources<sup>to extract and the returns</sup> are greater. We also find that larger dowries reduce the probability of violence. A<sup>husband's</sup> 21