Conspicuous Daughters: Exogamy, Marriage Expenditures, and Son Preference in India
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The literature on son preference postulates a strong link between marriage expenditures, dowry practices, and son preference, leading to the elimination of female foetuses and important discriminatory practices against girls. This statement, however, has not, as far as I know, been tested empirically using a representative sample of the Indian population. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) conducted in 2005, this paper shows that marriage expenditures by the bride’s family and dowry payments reduce stated son preference, <i>ceteris paribus,</i> supporting the idea that the bride’s family’s marriage expenditures and dowries are Veblen goods. The results, therefore, support the <i>sankritisation</i> theory, as expensive marriage practices are used to enhance social status. This result is robust to a series of robustness check, including the use of revealed son preference. The main drivers behind son preference appear to be exogamy and the need for old age support. Other important factors are religious beliefs and access to modern information (education and media). Finally, this article also shows that lavish marriage expenditures, for both groom’s and bride’s family, reduce fertility.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it