Brown, Philip H. 2009. “Dowry and Intrahousehold Bargaining: Evidence from China.” Journal of Human Resources 44(1): 25–46.
This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage using household data from rural China. Simultaneity problems are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the year preceding marriage as an instrument for dowry. Instrumented dowry positively impacts numerous measures of a wife’s welfare, including household purchases, the time allocation of household members, and the woman’s satisfaction with life, offering strong evidence in support of collective models of the household.
Philip H. Brown is Assistant Professor of Economics, Colby College. The data collection was generously funded by the Ford Foundation. The author is grateful to Albert Park for his guidance on this research. This paper has also benefited from the insights and suggestions of Bina Agarwal, Claudio Agostini, Axel Anderson, Pierre Andre Chiappori, Cheryl Doss, Esther Duflo, Martin Farnham, David Lam, Bill Parish, John Strauss, Jan Svejnar, Bob Willis, three anonymous referees, and participants at the Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference and the RAND Economic Demography Workshop. The author takes responsibility for all remaining errors. The data used in this article can be obtained from March 2010 to February 2013 from Philip H. Brown, 5246 Mayflower Hill, Waterville ME 04901; phbrown@colby.edu.