Can't Buy Me Love: A Field Experiment Exploring the Tradeoff Between Income and Caste in the Indian Matrimonial Market

Abstract: This study attempts to measure discriminatory preferences using a field experiment in an established matrimonial market in India. Indian marriages exhibit strong marital segregation along caste lines, and grooms typically advertise their income in matrimonial advertisements. This combination yields an ideal opportunity to measure discriminatory preferences in terms of foregone financial opportunities. We place matrimonial ads in a leading Bengali language newspaper on behalf of fictitious potential grooms. We systematically control caste and income characteristics of these grooms in order to measure substitution between these two attributes on the part of respondents. Responses from potential brides confirm a strong “own caste” preference, as brides respond more often to their own caste than to other castes. However, inter-caste responses, which constitute a significant proportion of the total responses, give us a measure of these discriminatory preferences in terms of groom’s income. In particular, we find that the group of highest-caste brides sends an average of 1.6 additional responses for every 1000-rupee increase in the monthly income of a lower-caste groom. Discriminatory preferences are so strong that even a quadrupling of income is not enough to make up for a one-level caste difference between grooms. Extrapolating out of sample from our data, we estimate that an eightfold difference in income might be required to make up for the difference in response rates by potential brides. These results indicate that affirmative action policies in India, which seek to enhance the income of the lowercaste population, are not likely to produce any significant change in inter-caste marriage.