Why Do Dowries Exist?

And having answered that, why are they not universal?

Many cultures and societies are “dotal” – that is to say, it is customary to give a dowry upon marriage. Becker describes them as being a price in order to clear the market for marriage. Presumably there is more demand for males than for females, and in order to have their daughter be married the family must pay a price. The dowry is not a universal feature, though – many societies do not have them, and have never had them at any point. Nor does it seem very plausible that the price of marriage would differ substantially for men and women. Everyone must reproduce to continue their lineage, and Fisher’s principle pushes us toward an even sex ratio. So why dowries? And why not bequests?

Botticini and Siow (2003), in the appropriately titled “Why Dowries?” point out that dowries are much more common in places where the daughter lives with the suitor, and married sons live with the family. This is called “virilocality” (mark that down for your word-of-the-day calendars). The sons thus have a greater comparative advantage when it comes to working with the family’s assets, and thus would be encouraged to work with them. Daughters, living outside of the house, would not. Thus, sons would receive assets only upon the death of the parents, so that they are encouraged to use them in thoughtful ways. If the dowry is converted into a bequest, then there will constantly remain the temptation to expropriate the gains.

Agricultural societies tend toward virilocality if there are returns to consistently working the same place. Land is not all land – climate varies substantially over very small areas. One of the theories of why peasants would scatter their plots miles apart is that this was a form of insurance against very local weather shocks,(see Deirdre McCloskey). Knowing the nature of your land really is meaningful. As Hume writes, “Why is the aged husbandman more skillful in his calling than the young beginner, but because there is a certain uniformity in the operation of the sun, rain, and earth, towards the production of vegetables; and experience teaches the old practitioner the rules, by which this operation is governed and directed?”

As societies transition away from agriculture, there is no longer much advantage from working with the family’s assets and land. The dowry withers away. We should also expect dowries to be infrequent in places which have, for whatever reason, little in the way of gains to experience working with particular plots of land, and indeed we do see this. They support this with work covered mainly in Botticini’s earlier work on dowries in Medieval Tuscany, and also by covering all cultures historical and contemporary. The big seeming exception to their theory is the lack of dowries in Africa, but this is fully explained by the prevalence of slash-and-burn agriculture, which dissipates any gains from working the same land over and over again.

What I want to write (and offer out to anyone else to write before I do) is something investigating the effect of dowries on social attitudes toward the elderly. Bernheim, Shleifer, and Summers (1985) show how the testator’s control over a bequest can allow them to extract all surplus from interactions from their beneficiaries; in a world where daughters are given a dowry and sent off, there is less of a need to be attentive to your parents as they grow old, and this cultural attitude might be persistent over generations. Of course, showing that the dowry is causally responsible is hard, maybe even impossible. It might be possible to use crop suitability as a sort of IV (although yes, it would really only be showing that some complex of traits which involves dowries is responsible). A model of how to do it would be Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013), who link the origin of gender roles to the plow in agriculture. Plows, as opposed to hoes, advantage having a particularly strong male to pull it – hoes have less of a return to strength. As such, places which were more geographically suited to plow agriculture have persistently more paternalistic attitudes, and these attitudes persist even when people migrate out of the culture.

Here is where you, the reader, comes in. I want to know of a dataset of time spent with their parents by children by country, and if possible, by subnational districts. Once found, I can first sanity check by overlaying the historic prevalence of dowries and time spent, and then do a two-stage least squares strategy by comparing climatic suitability for different types of crops with time spent. I do not pretend that this is a particularly good idea – but it is at least interesting, and in searching, perhaps something will come up.