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The Marriage Squeeze Interpretation of Dowry Inflation: Response

The main point of Edlund’s (2000, this issue) critique is that she is unable to replicate a result from my paper (Rao 1993) that a “marriage squeeze” resulted in an increase in dowries. It has been more than seven years since I finished writing the paper, and I cannot locate programs that constructed the sex ratio from census data, cleaned the household data, and merged the two data sets. I therefore cannot exactly replicate the household-level data set I used in 1993 because the version that I now have, and that I shared with Edlund, was cleaned and modified while estimating the 1993 regressions. The marriage ratio variable also presents a problem in that it was collected from district-level decennial census reports spanning the period 1921–81 from the census of British India, the census of the Princely State of Hyderabad, and the postindependence census of India. Political boundaries of states and districts in India were radically reconfigured several times both before and after independence, and the age breakdowns within which the census tables were reported also differ in some years. Constructing a consistent series therefore requires careful decisions on how to identify the districts within which the sample villages were located in the various years and how to deal with the changes in the age tables. The differences between Edlund’s decisions on how to construct a consistent series and mine have resulted in significantly different versions of the sex ratio variable. With an imperfect recall of the procedures I followed in 1993, I have attempted to recreate the original data set. The data and the results I now obtain are different from those of both my original paper and Edlund’s critique. I find that a quadratic specification of the sex ratio has a significant effect on dowries with positive derivatives at the mean and the median. While I cannot replicate a linear effect, the interpretation remains similar: that a marriage squeeze led to an increase in