The Price of Fertility: Marriage Markets and Family Planning in Bangladesh∗

This paper considers the impact of family planning on dowry transfers. We construct a model of the marriage market in which prospective mates anticipate the outcome of intrahousehold bargaining over fertility. We show that as the price of contraception falls, brides must compensate men with higher dowries in order to attract them into marriage. We test the model using data from a successful 1970s family planning experiment in Bangladesh, which lowered average fertility by 0.65 children. We find that the program increased bride-to-groom dowry transfer amounts by at least eighty percent. The marriage market’s response to a family planning program may dampen the welfare benefits of family planning for women. ∗We are grateful for helpful comments from George Akerlof, Pranab K. Bardhan, J. Bradford DeLong, Stefano DellaVigna, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Seema Jayachandran, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Jane Lancaster, David I. Levine, Trevon D. Logan, Martha Olney, Emmanuel Saez, Aloysius Siow, and seminar participants at UC Berkeley, Ohio State University, Santa Fe Institute, and IIES. Andrew Foster kindly shared his data. We would particularly like to thank Edward Miguel for several useful discussions and encouragement throughout. Please direct correspondence to Raj Arunachalam, Department of Economics, 549 Evans Hall #3880, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880. Email: [email protected].