The Brides of Boko Haram: Economic Shocks, Marriage Practices, and Insurgency in Nigeria

Marriage markets in rural Nigeria are characterised by bride price and polygamy. These customs may diminish marriage prospects for young men, causing them to join militant groups. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that marriage inequality increases civil conflict in the Boko Haram insurgency. To generate exogenous shocks to the marriage market, I exploit the fact that young women delay marriage in response to favourable pre-marital economic conditions, which increases marriage inequality primarily in polygamous villages. The same shocks that increase marriage inequality and extremist violence also lead women to marry fewer and richer husbands, generate higher average marriage expenditures, and increase insurgent abductions. The results shed light on the marriage market as an important driver of violent extremism.

Capitalizing Mail-Order Brides: American Hegemony and a Return to Pre-Feminism

Contrary to popular belief, mail-order marriage is not left behind in history. With technological advancement, globalism, and capitalism, mail-order relationships in the modern world have become a capitalist venture through the form of a global marriage market with Internet websites (Starr & Adams, 2016, pp. 968-969). Currently, the common practice operates internationally in between different nations and ethnicities (Merriman, 2012, p. 87). However, the mail-order bride market is distinct from the regular intercultural dating business: a clear power structure exists between the grooms (capitalist along with mail-order marriage companies) and the brides (commodities). This paper examines how this dating market serves Western men (I will be using this term interchangeably with American men) to reinforce traditional Western masculine hegemony and ethnic dominance in a global setting (Starr & Adams, 2016, p. 972).

Plenty of Fish in the Sea: Divorce Choice and the Quality of Singles

In the literature of marriage, divorce choices are usually assumed to not affect the distribution of types in the pool of singles. The scope of the present paper is to overcome this assumption. We analyse divorce choices when separation decision influences the distribution of singles and, thus, their expected quality. We consider a three-period model where heterogeneous individuals may unilaterally experience divorce and return to the marriage market. The choices of individuals are based on the change in the distribution of singles and the cost of waiting and divorcing, taking into consideration the individual’s eligibility in the marriage market. There are two main findings: Firstly, positive assortative matching dissolves with divorce for some intermediate types. Therefore, the endogenous positive assortative matching that usually emerges in models with nontransferable utility is weakened when matches can dissolve. Secondly, the existence of ranges where divorce emerges among individuals with positive assortative matching implies the existence of two disconnected classes of types. If matchings in the first period were to occur between individuals of different classes, such matches would be dissolved later.

More of the Same? Comparing the Personalities of Ex-Spouse and New Partner after Divorce

The similarity of the Big Five personality traits of ex-spouses and new partners was examined post-divorce. The notion that divorcees replicate their partner choice (fixed-type hypothesis) was tested against the hypotheses that they learn to select a new partner with more marriage-stabilizing personality traits than their former spouse (learning hypothesis), or are constrained by marriage market forces to repartner with someone who has less stabilizing personality traits (marriage market hypothesis). Data was derived from a Flemish study that sampled divorcees from the national register. The sample consisted of 700 triads of divorcees, their ex-spouses, and their new partners. The analysis results rejected the fixed-type hypothesis and instead supported both the learning hypothesis and the marriage market hypothesis, with higher order repartnering supporting the latter. Women also seemed to validate both hypotheses, as their partner comparison showed decreases in both stabilizing traits (conscientiousness and agreeableness) and destabilizing traits (neuroticism and extraversion). Overall, the results seem to suggest that divorcees do not repartner with someone of the same personality as their ex-spouse, and they are in some cases constrained by marriage market forces to repartner with less stabilizing personalities, while in other cases they are able to improve their partner selection.

Sanitation and Marriage Markets in India: Evidence from the Total Sanitation Campaign

This paper analyses the marriage decisions of men and women, focusing on the added attractiveness of sanitation within the living arrangement, in rural India. We exploit district and time variation from the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) which increased sanitation by 6.6 percent among households with marriage eligible children and generated an exogenous increase in the composition of households with sanitation. Using data from the Indian Human Development household survey (IHDS) and district level census, we show that exposure to TSC increased the probability of marriage for men and women, from poorer households, by 3.8 pp and 6.5 pp respectively. The reduced form estimates incorporate both general equilibrium effects and heterogeneous program effects – two important components of equilibrium marital behavior. To decompose the overall policy impact on marriage market equilibrium we formulate a simple matching model where men and women match on observed and unobserved characteristics. Through model simulations, we show that cohorts within TSC exposed markets experienced a shift in marital gains both across matches but also within a given match. Specifically, the resultant sorting patterns display a marked gender asymmetry with an increase in marital surplus among matches where men are wealthier than their spouse, and a decrease in surplus where the wife is wealthier. Moreover, the increased access to sanitation for TSC exposed women implied a decline in their expected control over resources within the marriage.