Bride Price and the Wellbeing of Women
Bride price, which is payment from the groom to the bride’s family at the time of marriage, is a common cultural practice in many African societies. It is often argued that it promotes the view that husbands have purchased their wives, resulting is poor treatment of wives, and in women trapped in unhappy marriages. In their Working Paper for
UNU-WIDER, Sara Lowes and Nathan Nunn examine 317 couples from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They find no evidence that a larger bride price payment is associated with earlier marriage or higher fertility, but the combination of a very high bride price and a requirement to pay back the bride price upon divorce is associated with lower levels of happiness for wives.
https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2017-131.pdf
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