[1440] Of pre-arranged marriage may hurt the labor market

Even during these days, they are those that advocates arranged marriage. The idea is obsolete and belongs to the stone age for so many reasons and therefore, there are many reasons and more to frown at arranged marriage. The Marginal Revolution stumbled upon one reason why hands of parents are inferior to marriage arranged by the invincible hand, specific to India:

“Arranged” marriages, characterized by strong parental control over mate choice, are the norm in India, although there is a steady transition towards autonomous ”love” marriages, especially within the urban middle class. I construct a novel dataset by surveying 6,030 parents and adult children in Mumbai, India, to study selection into arranged marriage and its effects on spouse choice. I consider the choice between an arranged and a love marriage as the outcome of bargaining between parents and children, when agents have different preferences for spouse attributes. I find that stronger financial and kinship ties between parents and sons increase the likelihood of an arranged marriage. Furthermore, when parents are involved in mate choice, sons are significantly less likely to marry college-educated women and women engaged in the labor force, after controlling for individual and family characteristics. I show that these effects are driven, at least in part, by parental preferences and cannot be entirely attributed to correlation between arranged marriages and unobserved characteristics or preferences. These results suggest that lowering the incentive for parental control in mate choice may improve investments in women’s human capital in India. [Divya Mathur. What’s Love Got To Do With It? Parental Involvement and Spouse Choice in Urban India. November 7 2007]