Abstract
The excessive marriage payment indicated by brideprice/dowry imposes a huge family financial burden, especially on rural households. Although some determinants have been examined, the relationship between matching types of couples and marriage payment is rarely known. The goal of this study is to analyze this relationship and the role of marriage distance in it. We adopt Logit, Tobit, and SUR models with the database across 70 years in rural China from a nearly national representative sample. The results show that love-match couples are 10.7% and 10.3% less likely to pay brideprice and dowry than that of parental matchmaking, respectively, and they pay less amount of brideprice and dowry. There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between marriage distance and brideprice/dowry, and love match has the largest correlation with marriage payment behaviors for couples with long marriage distance.
Highlights
Marriage Payment: Evidence fromBrideprice/dowry is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers because of its pervasive prevalence in developing countries and the significant property transfers and bargaining it entails [1,2]
Love match is significantly correlated with the likelihood of paying brideprice, which supports Hypothesis 1
Wedding reception expenditures of the couple are both positively related to the likelihood of paying brideprice, but the magnitudes of coefficient are negligible (p < 0.01) (Table 3, row 12 and 13, column 2)
Summary
Brideprice/dowry is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers because of its pervasive prevalence in developing countries and the significant property transfers and bargaining it entails [1,2] They can be several times larger than the annual income of rural households, which can be substantial enough to affect the welfare of women and a society’s distribution of wealth [3,4,5,6,7,8]. The high brideprice makes the phenomenon of “poverty due to marriage” occur in rural China frequently, which is one of the most important reasons for the decline of the marriage rate in China This poses great challenges to the sustainable development of Chinese society and the rational change of population structure. In ancient China, most people got married based on parents’ order or matchmaker’s word
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