“Made in heaven, matched by parents”: Can arranged marriage restrict labour market autonomy and participation of women?

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This paper investigates whether parent-arranged marriage causally reduces women’s post-marriage labour market autonomy and participation. We conceptualize and separately estimate two distinct dimensions of women’s labour market engagement: autonomy (the power to decide whether to work) and participation (the actual decision to work), a distinction overlooked in the existing literature. Using a nationally representative sample of approximately 30,000 currently married women from the India Human Development Survey (2011–12), we estimate causal effects using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits the intergenerational persistence of community marriage norms. Our primary instrument uses lagged marriage-type prevalence within state-caste cells; a second, Leave-One-Out instrument—constructed from other-caste groups’ historical patterns—serves simultaneously as a robustness check and a falsification test, with both instruments yielding statistically indistinguishable estimates. Relative to parent-arranged marriages, self-matched marriages causally increase labour market autonomy by 30 percentage points and participation by 14–16 percentage points; jointly-arranged marriages yield gains of 22 and 10–11 percentage points, respectively. These effects are large, given that only 42% of women in our sample report autonomy over work decisions. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the pronounced asymmetry between autonomy and participation arises from structural barriers rather than women’s preferences. Our findings imply that policies targeting marriage norms must be complemented by supply-side labour market interventions to achieve commensurate gains in women’s economic participation.