Abstract:
Rajasthani women typically marry young and leave school early. In this paper we develop a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate parental preferences over girls’ education, age of marriage and marriage match characteristics, as well as subjective beliefs over the joint distribution of these variables, for a sample of 6,000 parents in the Dhaulphur district of Rajasthan. Our identification approach is based on comparing choices made in situations with and without uncertainty over the realisation of future offers. We use our results to examine the marriage market return to being educated and young and ask whether this can help to explain low rates of female human capital investment and high rates of early marriage in this community.

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docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RGiVMwMBw0NPXh9BF6ooO6HJA1J56wqf_en2deCi-ZY/edit#gid=0