Marry for what? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India

Joint with: Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak and Jeanne Lafortune

This paper studies the role played by caste, education, and other attributes in arranged marriages among middle class Indians. We interviewed a sample of parents of prospective grooms and brides who placed matrimonial ads in a popular Bengali newspaper. We collected information on the number of responses that they got to the ad as well as the details of a subset of these responses, how they ranked these responses, whether they actually wrote back

to them and their ranking of other ads in the newspaper. A year later, we surveyed them a second time and learned about the ultimate outcome of their search: whether their child was married, and with whom. We use the first interview data to the preferences for castes, education, beauty, and other attributes. We then compute a set of stable matches, which we compare to the actual matches that we observe in the data. We find the stable matches to

look quite similar to the actual matches, suggesting a relatively frictionless marriage market. One of the key empirical findings of this study is that there is a very strong preference for in-caste marriage. For example, parents are willing to marry their child to someone with

many fewer years of education if that person is from their own caste. However, because this preference is shared by both sides of the markets (i.e., caste preferences are horizontal rather than vertical), and because the groups are fairly homogenous in terms of other attributes, in

equilibrium, the cost of insisting on marrying within one's caste is small. This allows castes to remain a persistent feature of the Indian marriage market.

For more information, contact Petra Todd.