Search, Marriage and Demographics: The Marriage Squeeze in India and Age Patterns of Marriage

This thesis studies the effect of population growth on marriage age and marriage transfers in the context of the marriage squeeze in India, and then extends the inquiry to a general analysis of marriage age patterns.;If women marry on average younger than men, increased population growth can cause a surplus of women in the market, because younger cohorts are relatively larger. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate if this so-called marriage squeeze has caused the lamented "inflation" of dowries in India, by leading to a higher price for scarce husbands.;Chapter 1 documents the changes in population growth, marriage ages, and dowries in India during the 20th century, and shows that the surplus of women under the squeeze must lead to a shrinking marriage age gap that existing models cannot account for.;Chapter 2 builds a model of two-sided search with transferable utility in which the match payoff depends on age, and uses it to theoretically and empirically analyze the effect of demographic change on marriage age and transfers at marriage. With data from the Indian census and the National Family Health Survey it is shown that, under the proposed model, the observed shifts in the age distributions and the sex ratio of unmarried men and women in India must lead to higher dowries conditional on the age of the partners. Moreover, a structural estimation of the model parameters additionally suggests that average dowries have increased, and the age gap at marriage has fallen, as a consequence of the squeeze.;The positive difference in marriage age between husband and wife that drives the marriage squeeze is not unique to India, but a near universal trait of marriage markets, as is assortative matching by age. Chapter 3 of this thesis uses a continuous variant of the model to characterize a set of match payoff functions consistent with age sorting and "differential age matching". Unlike in traditional search models, where the match payoff depends on a fixed type, the payoff function need not be supermodular (submodular) for assortative matching. More generally, this chapter highlights the distinct role of age as a decision criterion in matching and search.