4. Data. The data used in this paper are from a household survey for a study titled "Poverty, Gender Inequality and Reproductive Choice". The fieldwork for this study was carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi, between July 1995 and September 1995. The study was conducted in five districts of Uttar Pradesh (north India) and five districts of Karnataka (south India). Districts were chosen to represent the agroclimatic diversities of each state. In Uttar Pradesh, the districts surveyed were Almora, Faizabad, Ghazipur, Mathura and Muzaffarnagar, while those in Karnataka were Bidar, Dakshin Kannad, Kodagu, Kolar and Mysore. The study covered 35 villages in each state averaging 7-9 villages per district. The total number of households included in the study was 1078 in Uttar Pradesh and 800 in Karnataka. The focus of the study, however, was on women in the reproductive age group of 15-49 years and men with wives in the same age group. Thus, the number of women selected in the reproductive age group was 914 and 687 for Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka. Of these, the number of women who responded, along with their husbands, to the questionnaire of this study were 529 in Uttar Pradesh and 658 in Karnataka.

The households included in this study were predominantly Hindu in both states (87% each). 12% of the households in Uttar Pradesh and 11% of the households in Karnataka were Muslims, with Christians and Sikhs representing the remaining 1% and 2%. Since the practice of dowry is more prevalent and consequential among Hindus, I consider the Hindu households only. After eliminating the non-Hindu households and households with missing data, a sample of 464 marriages in Uttar Pradesh and 573 marriages in Karnataka remained for the analysis, spread more or less evenly across the five districts. A test in which means of the sub-sample of 1037 were compared with the full sample did not detect differences significant enough to reject the hypothesis that they come from the same population.

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