Individual vs . Parental Consent in Marriage :

which could make parental consent growth enhancing. For example, since it favors old men with many adult daughters, it could raise longevity and population growth. Parental consent could also be important for understanding extended families. If extended families provide more household public goods, e.g. good health, this can counteract a less favorable allocation of private goods, e.g., human capital. In our model we assume that the father is able to confiscate his son’s humancapital income (effectively employ adult sons at subsistence wage). This may be realistic if the father controls some key resource, such as land. Since land is typically passed down from father to son, it begs the question why the adult son does not borrow against his expected inheritance to invest in his children, if such an investment were to yield a higher return than the land given up. Empirically, such transactions have not been common. In fact, even in landscarce Asia, land markets have traditionally been thin, and most sales caused by financial distress. Although outside the scope of this paper, a potential reason may be that uninsurable risk gives rise to precautionary savings in the form of land, and social norms have arisen to curb disposal of land unless a matter of life and death. The relevance of a model without capital markets or bequests is perhaps not an inconceivable characterization of pre-industrial societies, but ultimately an empirical question. Finally, our model only examines the growth effects of reallocating resources from fathers to sons. But, individual consent also redistributes from men to women, and there are several ways in which this might be good for growth. Women might have stronger preferences for the quality of children than do men; since individual consent raises the income of women it may thus induce a