Marriage markets and female empowerment in rural Bangladesh: Evidence from three experiments

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Marriage markets and female empowerment in rural Bangladesh: Evidence from three experiments "
Christina Ruth Peters A. M. Mobarak

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	53789
Doc. No	:	TL23743
Call number	:	‭3315787‬
Main Entry	:	Christina Ruth Peters
Title & Author	:	Marriage markets and female empowerment in rural Bangladesh: Evidence from three experiments\ Christina Ruth Peters
College	:	University of Colorado at Boulder
Date	:	2008
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2008
Page No	:	163
Abstract	:	This dissertation examines the effects of three major development initiatives in rural Bangladesh on marital sorting and female empowerment. The first chapter documents that a family planning and health services program intended to empower women through fertility control led to negative welfare changes in some key aspects of those women's lives, including shifts both in intra-household bargaining power and in the dowries that they are required to pay their husbands. Difference-in-difference tests using a control group of households from non-treated villages show that after the program begins, women pay higher dowries in order to obtain husbands with access to the program. Moreover, compared to women in the comparison villages, women in the treatment area in both pre-existing and post-program marriages are less likely to be able to make large purchases without permission from their husbands or another household member. The second chapter uses the construction of a flood protection embankment to understand differential changes in the marital prospects of women from protected households that experienced this positive wealth shock. My co-authors and I use construction of the embankment on one side of the river as a source of exogenous variation in risk exposure and wealth across households living on either bank in a difference-in-differences empirical set-up. Protected households commanded larger dowries and married into wealthier families after embankment construction, but there were only weak effects on age at marriage. Protected households were also relatively less likely to marry biological relatives after embankment construction. The third chapter provides evidence that participation in microcredit programs increases the likelihood of female social action against domestic violence and spousal abandonment. I use residence in a program village as a proxy for individual self-selection into program participation, and the frequency and size of natural disaster events as an instrument to control for non-random program placement by village. Instrumental variables specifications show that women from villages with microcredit programs are three times more likely than women from non-program villages to claim they would publicly protest when they observe their neighbor being beaten, abandoned, or divorced by their husband.
Subject	:	Social sciences; Bangladesh; Embankment; Empowerment; Family planning; Female empowerment; Intra-household bargaining; Marriage; Microcredit; Rural communities; Women; Economics; 0501:Economics
Added Entry	:	A. M. Mobarak
Added Entry	:	University of Colorado at Boulder