Bishnupriya Gupta, 2014, Where have all the brides gone? Son preference and marriage in India over the 20th century

[Jan 26th; interesting topic and delicate logic analysis]

The factors impacting marriage imbalance analyzed in this paper are concluded inthe following graph.

Here are the facts uncovered by the paper with the help of the 1931 India census data: 1) because of pater-local culture, where sons are responsible for parents’ old-care and funerals, Hindu families are son-preferred. Thi stradition is proved to be significant in northern region of India, and manifested by 0-5 sex ratio. And owing to the hierarchical caste system, high caste should have stronger preference for sons. A plausible hypothesis can be proposed based on these: the northern region and high-caste families have stronger son-preference, therefore the surplus of males in marriage market, or higher single rate of males, is more likely to happen. But two factors may alleviate this tendency. 2) The first is Hyper-gamy, which requires that males can marry lower-caste females, but females can’t marry lower-caste males; this pushes high-status males to a more advantageous place in the marriage market. Then high-caste males are less likely to stay single. 3) The second factor is "marriage squeeze", which is directly caused by the fact that males oftenmes timarry younger females (3.1 marriage age gap), therefore the female marriage-age cohort is larger. The mitigating effect of marriage squeeze is strengthened when 3.2) population is growing, because this will make the female cohort larger. And 3.3) mortal rate, together with 3.4) regulations w.r.t. remarriageof females and males will also affect the sex ratio in marriage market.

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