Bloch, Francis, Vijayendra Rao, and Sonalde Desai. 2004. "Wedding Celebrations as Conspicuous Consumption: Signaling Social Status in Rural India." Journal of Human Resources 39(3): 675-695.

We examine the determinants of expenditures on wedding celebrations by rural Indian families. We develop a status signaling model of wedding celebrations where the size of the celebration signals the quality of the new groom’s family and, thus, the enhanced social status of the bride’s family. Predictions from the model are tested with survey data from South India using a natural experiment derived from variations in norms of village exogamy--when daughters have to marry grooms from another village--to identify the availability of information on the groom’s family to the bride’s village. The econometric results are consistent with a status signaling interpretation.

Francis Bloch is a professor at GREQAM and Ecole Superieure de Mecanique de Marseille. Vijayendra Rao is a senior economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Sonalde Desai is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. The authors are grateful to Rama Ranee and NCAER for their invaluable contribution to the fieldwork, and to two anonymous referees, and participants in the NEUDC and SABE conferences for valuable suggestions. They are indebted to the Rockefeller, Mellon and Schlakenbach Foundations for financial support. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the authors’ own and should not be attributed to the World Bank, its Board of Directors, or any of its member countries. The data contained in this article may be obtained between January 2005 and December 2008 from Vijayendra Rao, Development Research Group, The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW, Washington DC, 20433, USA (email: vrao@worldbank.org).