2.dos Problems with established investigation

Because the dowry is lawfully blocked inside the Asia and you will Bangladesh, some one constantly think twice to tell you perfect dowry numbers. The quality concern to your dowry regarding the Indian dataset requires on the community-built dowry. Such, the latest India Individual Invention Survey asks “Essentially in your neighborhood to possess a family group eg yours, which are the variety of things that are offered given that gift ideas in the course of brand new daughter’s relationships?” A residential area-founded dowry is not necessarily the same as a single dowry, that is paid down of the bride’s parents at the time of marriage. Alternatively, the question off dowry allows just a digital address, we.elizabeth., even if an optimistic amount of dowry is actually paid (e.grams., Questionnaire towards Reputation of women and you will Virility in both Asia and you can Pakistan). A digital answer, obviously, doesn’t bring much more information. Standard out-of whether or not an optimistic dowry amount emerges matches so you can, which will be mainly explained of the, cultural, religious, and you may status backgrounds from inside the Southern China.

Due to the fact dowry is not legitimately blocked from inside the Pakistan, the total amount actually paid from the female respondent’s moms and dads is asked in place of reservation inside a Pakistani dataset including the Pakistan Outlying Household Survey. Regardless if Pakistani interviewees may well not purposefully hide real information on dowry methods, brand new questionnaire will get nonetheless have bear in mind mistakes just like the respondents need to bear in mind the brand new dowry amount paid off by their moms and dads in the past. Figure 1a plots of land this new forecast amount of actual dowry viewpoints counted for the Pakistani Rupees within the 2004 on to wedding season having fun with studies of this new Pakistan Rural Domestic Survey. Since the opinion is the fact actual dowry quantity is broadening, or perhaps showcase a low-decreasing trend, this new figure suggests the general tendency off remember problems. This means that, the brand new extended the fresh gap involving the interviewees’ relationships and also the keep in mind day, the much more likely he or she is in order to overestimate the dowry number.

Dating anywhere between women’s ounts. Brand new line reveals the newest predicted genuine level of dowry regressed towards the ladies’ relationships seasons. The new shaded urban area reveals 95% confidence interval of your predict number of dowry. The content sourced elements of (a) and you will (b) are Pakistan Rural Domestic Questionnaire 2004, and the rural house questionnaire used because of the blogger into the 2013, respectively

step 3 Study

On the best of our very own studies, studies built-up within this study are the earliest to take on explicitly a standard tendency to overestimate a price paid lengthy ago. Much like the properties out-of in the past compiled investigation, ours are also retrospective; but not, centered on it interest, we such observed specific services to attenuate questionnaire bear in mind problems. Eg, i required the degree of one another neighborhood-founded dowry (non-retrospective) and personal dowry amount paid off in the course of this new respondent’s marriage (retrospective). Since Pakistani dowry contains gold/jewellery, dresses, seats, cooking utensils, and so on, we queried dowry quantity of the goods. Whenever we sensed a great respondent’s overestimation of one’s dowry count, especially in the situation regarding a marriage you to definitely occurred an excellent long time in the past, once the dowry is exhibited, we can and you may did consider this type of amounts which have people who attended new service. Therefore, all of our investigation to the predict actual levels of dowry elite singles date (Fig. 1b) don’t show people decreasing development, having said that having people said from inside the Fig. 1a.

3.step 1 Survey

When conducting our survey between , we intended to capture the heterogeneous aspects of the Punjab province in Pakistan. We divided Punjab (36 districts) into five regions: Pothohar (or North), Central, East, West, and South Punjab. Climate, culture (including marriage/inheritance practices), and socioeconomic conditions differ across regions but are similar within each region. We randomly selected one district from each region, namely, Rawalpindi, Mandi Bahauddin, Narowal, Muzaffargarh, and Bahawalnagar (Fig. 2). We used the district census for 1998–1999, the latest census available in Pakistan as of 2013, to randomly select six villages in rural areas in each of the five districts. We restricted sampling villages to those with a population of at least 1000 at the time of the census. In each village, we selected 22 households, following a stratified random sampling methodology. First, with assistance from the village chief, we made a list of households in the village and categorized them into a stratum. The strata are kammees Footnote 10 (i.e., traditional service or lower caste, with annual income ? PKR 200,000, > PKR 200,000) and zamindars (i.e., landowning farmers with land 12.5 acres). Eligible households in our survey are defined as those with an economically active husband and wife aged 15–65. Second, we performed stratified random sampling so that the share of each stratum in our sample corresponds to the share of each stratum of the village population (= households).