Marriage reform, polygamy and female intrahousehold bargaining: Evidence from Nigeria

Evidence from empirical literature highlights income, education and pre-marriage assets as major factors in determining intrahousehold bargaining power of women. In this paper, I examine another possible determinant of female bargaining power: type of marriage. More specifically, I evaluate the impact of an Islamic law reform in northern Nigeria on polygamy while also exploiting differences in exposure to the reform by state of residence, age and year of marriage as a source of exogenous variation in polygamy to estimate its direct causal effect on female intrahousehold bargaining power. The results suggest that, compared to similar women not exposed to the reform, those in the affected group are 0.149 percentage points less likely to be polygamous. Further, on the average, not being polygamous increases female bargaining power by 0.335 percentage points