Erica Field, Attila Ambrus
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Attila Ambrus, Erica Field, Máximo Torero
We explain trends in dowry levels in Bangladesh by drawing attention to an institutional feature of marriage contracts previously ignored in the literature: mehr or traditional Islamic bride-price. We develop a model of marriage contracts in which mehr serves as a barrier to husbands exiting marriag...
Erica Field, Attila Ambrus
This paper provides empirical evidence of the influence of adolescent marriage opportunities on female schooling attainment and gives predictions of the impact of imposing universal age-of-consent laws. Using data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the commonly cited hypotheses that women attain less...
Attila Ambrus, Erica Field
Using data from rural Bangladesh, we explore the hypothesis that women attain less schooling as a result of social and financial pressure to marry young. We isolate the causal effect of marriage timing using age of menarche as an instrumental variable. Our results indicate that each additional year ...
Attila Ambrus, Erica Field
This is a companion paper to Ambrus, Field and Torrero (2008). We extend the theoretical analysis of a marriage market with prenuptial agreements to a dynamic setting, in which individuals can reenter the marriage market after failed marriages. We show that the qualitative conclusions of the static ...