most polygamy-averse may have preferred to remain single, we are likely to obtain a lower bound estimate of the impact of the risk of polygamy on savings. However, staying single is not a desirable option for women in the Senegalese society, where social status is highly correlated with marital status. This issue of social status is also related to the question of divorce as an exit option for monogamously married wives in the case of the entry of a second wife into the union. While divorce is possible and relatively frequent in Senegal, a woman who chooses to divorce does not stay single for long and is more likely to remarry as a second- or higher-rank wife, making divorce a very costly and inefficient strategy for monogamous wives who want to avoid polygamy.

Another concern is linked to the fact that the polygamous status of the husband’s father is very likely known by the bride, which may imply some form of assortative mating. One interpretation of this is that only women who have no other option marry a man with a high risk of polygamy. Note, however, that this concern may be of second order for women since being married as a first wife, even to a man more likely to become polygamous, is probably preferable to marrying as a higherorder wife. In a context where a probably significant share of marriages are arranged, women who have no choice but marry a high-risk husband might be from a poorer or more traditional background. Yet, we account for these characteristics of the wife by controlling in both our first and second step regressions for the education and sector of activity of both spouses’ fathers. We further control for the age difference between husband and wife, and, in additional specifications, we include in the set of regressors the bride price and the amount spent for the wedding as proxies for the bargaining power of the wife. Controlling for these variables, capturing in part the bargaining power of the wife, does not affect our estimation results, which makes us confident that assortative mating does not bias our results. Another interpretation of this potential assortative mating could be that women who choose to marry a man with a higher perceived risk of polygamy may be less averse to polygamy. In such a case, our results would be biased toward zero since we would expect less response to the anticipated risk of polygamy.

IV. DATA _The PSF Individual Panel Survey_ The data used in this paper come from an original nationally representative household survey, “Poverty and Family Structure” (PSF), conducted in Senegal from 2006 to 2012.<sup>16</sup> The data were collected in two waves, in 2006 and 2007 for the first wave and 16 The survey has been conducted by a team of French researchers and researchers from the National Statistical Agency of Senegal and is described in detail in DeVreyer et al. (2008). Momar Sylla and Matar Gueye (both of the Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie of Senegal [ANSD]), and Philippe De Vreyer (ParisDauphine Dauphine, IRD-DIAL), Sylvie Lambert (PSE), and Abla Safir (World Bank) designed the survey. The data have been collected by the ANSD thanks to the funding of the International Development Research Center (IDRC), INRA Paris, CEPREMAP and the World Bank.

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