We examine the effect of rainfall shocks on dowry deaths using data from 583 Indian districts for 2002-2007. We find that a one standard deviation decline in annual rainfall from the local mean increases reported dowry deaths by 7.8 percent. Wet shocks have no apparent effect. We examine patterns of other crimes to investigate whether an increase in general unrest during economic downturns expl...

Bride burning and suicide by young married females has been a focus of attention in the midia during the last few years. It has been discussed across forums resulting in loud protest against dowry and cruelty to young married women. That even in the late 20th century women could bo bartered for money and treated ignominously by their husbands and inlaws has created a wide-spread resentment. A f...

assessment of compensation for the reduction in the value of the currency in case of the financial dowry is the issues that were not previously. the creation of credit money and their value redution caused that compensation for the value of money be considered as a means to preserve the value of money in financial liabilities arise such as dowry. in this regard, there was an waver to article 10...

Existing theoretical and empirical research on dowries has difficulty accounting for the large changes in dowry levels observed in many countries over the past few decades. To explain trends in dowry levels in Bangladesh, we draw attention to an institutional feature of marriage contracts previously ignored in the literature: the mehr or traditional Islamic brideprice, which functions as a pren...

In contrast to most dowry oriented societies where payments have declined with modernisation, those in India have undergone signi ̄cant in°ation over the last ̄ve decades. This paper explains the di®erence between these two experiences by focusing on the role played by caste. The theoretical model contrasts caste and non-caste based societies: in the former, there exists an inherited component t...

We examine the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, in a dualistic transitional economy, where preferences conflict across generations and the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments. Parental control generates persistence of low levels of female literacy, despite economic growth. In steady state equilibrium, t...

Marriage in India is a voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. It is a social association where the husband has the responsibility to take care of and maintain his wife and not to neglect his duties. But in relation to this great institution, the problem of the "dowry" still persists. Women are ill-treated, harassed, killed or divorced for the simple re...

In developing countries, the extent to which women possess property rights is shaped in large part by transfers received at the time of marriage. Focusing on dowry, we develop a simple model of the marriage market with intrahousehold bargaining to understand the incentives for brides’ parents to allocate the rights over the dowry between their daughter and her groom. In doing so, we clarify and...