Longitudinal analysis reveals marital migration mitigates income risks and enables consumption smoothing in rural households, indicating marriage functions as interhousehold risk insurance.
A significant proportion of migration in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage. The authors seek to explain these mobility patterns based on a framework in which the marriage of daughters to locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks. Analyses of longitudinal data on consumption patterns, income, and marital arrangements in South Indian households lend support to the theory.
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Rosenzweig et al. (1989) studied this question.
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