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.

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.

More choice for men? Marriage patterns after World War II in Italy

We investigate how changes in the sex ratio induced by World War II affected the bargaining patterns of Italian men in the marriage market. Marriage data from the first wave of the Italian Household Longitudinal Survey (1997) are matched with newly digitized information on war casualties coming from the Italian National Bureau of Statistics. We find that men in post-war marriages were better off in terms of their spouse's education, this gain amounting to about half a year of schooling. By considering heterogeneity across provinces, we find that the effects were more pronounced in rural provinces, mountainous provinces, and provinces with a higher share of population employed in agriculture. This result suggests that in these provinces the war caused a more fundamental change in marriage patterns compared to urban, lower-lying, and less agricultural provinces where marriage markets might have been more flexible to begin with.

Gender norm conflict and marital outcomes

We investigate the impact of male–female conflict over gender norms on marital outcomes. As marriage requires mutual agreement regarding the role of husband and wife, we hypothesize that a person who is less likely to encounter a potential mate with similar gender norms will face a lower chance of marrying. Even if two parties marry despite a difference in gender norms, their marriage may be more vulnerable to external shocks, making divorce more likely relative to their counterparts without gender norm conflict. Finally, we predict that in the presence of gender norm conflict, high-skilled individuals may be less likely to get or stay married relative to low-skilled individuals, as the former group faces better outside options. Estimates from an analysis of U.S. marriage markets differentiated by birth cohort, state, race, and skill level support our theoretical predictions. Additional extensions explore heterogeneous effects and additional outcomes such as the presence of children in the household.

Where did it go wrong? Marriage and divorce in Malawi

Do individuals marry and divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure the economic attractiveness of a person's marriage market? We answer these questions using a structural model of consumer‐producer households that is applied to rich data from Malawi. Using revealed preference conditions for a stable marriage market, we define the economic attractiveness of a potential match as the difference between the potential value of consumption and leisure with the new partner and the value of consumption and leisure in the current marriage. We estimate this marital instability measure for every possible pair in geographically defined marriage markets in 2010. We find that the marital instability measure is predictive of future divorces, particularly for women. We further show that this estimated effect on divorce is mitigated by the woman's age, and by a lack of men, relative to women, in the marriage market, showing that these factors interact with the economic attractiveness of the remarriage market. These findings provide out‐of‐sample validation of our model and evidence that the economic value of the marriage market matters for divorce decisions.

Equilibrium of Invisible Hand in the Family: the Gravitation between Men and Women in Marriage Markets

The proof of the Invisible hand describes the inner market mechanism, which leads the producer to the meeting point with the uninformed consumer, where the price and the meeting time provide the maximization of the output on the consumption-leisure production possibility frontier and unintentionally maximize the buyer’s consumption-leisure utility. This mechanism also works in marriage markets where the Invisible hand corrects the misleading information. The paper confirms G. S. Becker’s assumption that more beautiful, charming, and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men but refutes his conclusion that such marriage maximizes the aggregate output. The high male productivity really attracts women because it produces a strong male gravitation field. But the marriage of a very productive man to a beautiful woman fails because it represents for a beautiful woman a corner solution. The man’s wealth, accumulated before the marriage, as well the bride price reinforces this disequilibrium. A dowry can also result in a disequilibrium because it gives time for a man to look for another partner. The paper argues that the quality of men is determined not by their productivity as such but by the trade-off between the productivity and their ability to provide household services on the family consumption-leisure production possibility frontier. The quality of women is determined by the trade-off between household activity and efforts to support her natural female attractiveness. The invisible hand equilibrium represents something close to the mating of unlikes but with some peculiarities. The woman’s ability to provide household services substitutes the man’s household activity but it complements his gender-related quality of productivity. A housewife raises the productivity of her husband; she increases his attractiveness and reinforces his gravitation field at the expense of her own attractiveness and her gravitation field but only this way she maximizes her consumption-leisure utility. Polygamy also represents the invisible hand equilibrium but in this case the equal distribution of wealth between wives is followed by unequal distribution of household activities when some wives spend less time in the kitchen but more leisure time with the husband because they are more attractive. In monogamy, the woman’s strong gravitation field produces the phenomenon of the ‘tragedy of a femme fatale’. Her alliance with a wealthy man comes to the corner solution; she needs more attention of her husband but with that she decreases his gravitational field, and he becomes less interesting to her. The loss of male attractiveness results in the short time horizon of the equilibrium determined by the invisible hand.