Consumption-smoothing, migration and marriage: evidence from rural India
Stark, O.; Rosenzweig, M.R.
Paper David Horowitz Institute for the Research of Developing Countries 4: 30pp.
1989
DOI: 10.2307/1832196Document Number: 352595
A significant proportion of migration in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage. This study seeks to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among Indian households. In particular, it investigates the hypothesis that the marrying out of daughters to locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households is a manifestation of implicit inter-household contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks. Analysis of longitudinal South Indian village data lends support to the hypothesis. Marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption. Farm households afflicated with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration. The hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration which are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains.