This paper examines how domestic violence may be used as an instrument to extract larger transfers from a spouse's family. It is based on a case-study of three villages in Southern India, conducted by the authors, that combines qualitative and survey data. Based on the ethnographic evidence, we develop a non-cooperative bargaining and signaling model of dowries and domestic violence. The predictions from these models are tested with survey data. We find that women who pay smaller dowries suffer an increased risk of marital violence, as do women who come from richer families.
The threat of violence is often used as a means of redistributing resources. The Mafia extorts protection money from people under its control, and terrorists threaten hostages with death in order to extract concessions from governments. There is obviously a great deal of economic content in violent behavior and yet it has been neglected as a subject of research by most economists1. One prominent example of economically motivated violence comes from the Indian sub-continent where numerous press reports indicate the widespread use of wife-abuse as a means of extracting transfers from the wife’s parents2. In its most publicized form, disputes over the dowry give rise to what newspapers describe as «dowry murders» where wives are burned alive by their husband’s families3. Thus, «dowry» violence does not refer directly to marriage related payments made at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded after the marriage by the groom’s family where the husband systematically abuses the wife in order to extract larger transfers. In this paper we conduct a case-study of domestic violence in rural India focusing on its use as a bargaining instrument.
There is a small literature on the economics of domestic violence4; Tauchen, Witte and Long (1991) and Farmer and Tiefenthaler (1997) develop and test non-cooperative bargaining models of violence, and Farmer and Tiefenthaler (1996) theoretically examine how the use of shelters can serve as a signal of a woman's tolerance of violence. More recently, Lundberg and Pollak (1998) have constructed a model of the intergenerational transmission of domestic violence. The literature on intra-household bargaining is both more extensive and more empirical (Alderman, Chiappori and Kanbur, 1995). Most of these studies follow the work of Manser and Brown (1980) and McElroy and Horney (1981) who develop cooperative models of bargaining within marriage with divorce as the threat point. Lundberg and Pollak (1993) extend this by allowing for an internal non-cooperative threat point where the husband and wife live in "separate spheres."
Our paper differs from these literatures in various ways: It employs ethnographic information on the behaviors underlying dowry related violence culled from open ended interviews conducted in three villages in rural South India to inform the development of a non-cooperative model of bargaining and signaling. Predictions from the model are then econometrically tested with survey data collected from the same population that is the focus of the ethnographic interviews. Thus, our paper is unusual in two respects. Firstly, it introduces asymmetric information into a model of household bargaining where domestic violence is used as a signal of the husband's satisfaction with the marriage. Secondly, it combines economic and anthropological methods to rigorously examine violence within the context of Indian marriage markets employing data collected by the authors. We find that marital violence is not only closely linked to low dowry payments, but that a woman who comes from a wealthy family is more likely to be beaten by her husband in an effort to extract higher transfers from her parents.
