TY - JOUR AU - Banerjee,Abhijit AU - Duflo,Esther AU - Ghatak,Maitreesh AU - Lafortune,Jeanne TI - Marry for What: Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14958 PY - 2009 Y2 - May 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14958 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14958.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Abhijit Banerjee MIT Department of Economics E52-252d 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8855 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu Esther Duflo Department of Economics MIT, E52-252G 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/258-7013 Fax: 617/253-6915 E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu Maitreesh Ghatak London School of Economics Department of Economics R521 (STICERD) Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE, U.K. E-Mail: m.ghatak@lse.ac.uk Jeanne Lafortune Instituto de Economia Facultad de Ciencias Economicas y Administrativas Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Avda Vicuna Mackenna 4860 Macul, Santiago Chile E-Mail: jlafortune@uc.cl AB - This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them, and the eventual matches. We estimate the preferences for caste, education, beauty, and other attributes. We then compute a set of stable matches, which we compare to the actual matches that we observe in the data. We find the stable matches to be quite similar to the actual matches, suggesting a relatively frictionless marriage market. One of our key empirical findings is that there is a very strong preference for within-caste marriage. However, because both sides of the market share this preference and because the groups are fairly homogeneous in terms of the distribution of other attributes, in equilibrium, the cost of wanting to marry within-caste is low. This allows caste to remain a persistent feature of the Indian marriage market. ER -