Marrage Cost And Human Capital Investment Research

With the rising level of wedding gifts in today’s society,the meaning of bride price is being re-examined in a chorus of complaints.In recent years,the change of bride price in rural areas and the squeeze of marriage market have deeply affected the decision-making of rural people.In order to escape the high bride price and match better spouses,people adjust their human capital investment to improve their comprehensive competitiveness.This paper studies the impact of bride price on human capital investment in rural areas from the perspective of economics.Specifically,based on CFPS data,CHARLS data,National Bureau of Statistics,Sixth Population Census data,and data from the Judgment Document Network,this paper constructs panel data for different cohorts and estimates the impact of wedding gifts on individual human capital investment and its mechanism.The results of this study show that(1)the improvement of bride price can promote the group improvement of human capital investment in rural marriage markets;(2)the marginal effect of bride price on men is greater than that on women,and their human capital investment will increase by 4% to obtain higher education;(3)the marginal effect of bride price is related to the amount of bride price,and the marginal effect is greater in areas with lower levels of bride price.With the improvement of bride price,the positive effect of bride price becomes insignificant.In addition to direct competition mechanisms,the positive effect of bride price on human capital comes from population mobility mechanism.High bride price in rural areas promotes the outflow of local young people,motivating men to invest in human capital to obtain partners;both men and women need to invest in human capital first in order to successfully flow into other cities to obtain income,match better spouses,etc.Besides,the improvement of bride price will squeeze out family consumption other than bride price,thus inhibiting people’s investment in human capital.The innovations of this paper are as follows: first,the paper constructs the divorce-bride price litigation ratio as the instrumental variable of bride price by using the judicial document network;Second,explain the transmission of marriage market through the impact on population mobility.The research conclusions of this paper show that bride price can promote human capital investment in rural families and promote people’s flow from rural to urban areas and the effect is more pronounced at lower levels.However,the "crowding out effect" of high wedding gifts will also inhibit family human capital accumulation.This study enriches the research on human capital research and marriage economy.The conclusion of this paper provides a reference for transforming outmoded habit and custom in bride price as well as document policy making.