Bride price and household income: evidence from rural China

Abstract

A number of recent studies have investigated the relationship between bride prices and social development. However, there has been little empirical evidence that bride prices affect household income. Based on a unique set of bride price data from China and data from China's Labour Force Dynamic Survey (CLDS), this paper studies the effect of bride prices on rural household income. The findings show that higher bride prices can significantly reduce rural household income. For income categories, higher bride prices have a significantly negative impact on the agricultural income of rural households, while higher bride prices can boost rural households’ remittance income by inducing individuals to work as migrant workers. There is a significant age difference in the impact of rural household income. Finally, the relationship between bride prices and income is an inverted U-shape, and moderate bride prices are conducive to income growth.

Keywords:

• Culture
• bride price
• marriage squeeze
• rural income
• human capital
• inverted “U” type

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 In Figure 2, they are represented by numbers 1–9.

2 The cause of civil action is that the man paid the bride prices in advance, but the woman repented and refused to return bride prices.

3 It is generally believed that only a higher bride prices will institute legal proceedings, which may overestimate bride prices in our paper. But in China, there is no need to worry, because the bride prices of China have an average level basically in all regions . With the exception of extreme cases, the actual payment of bride prices by the bridegroom unlikely deviate from the average level of bride prices in the region.