Karine Moukkadem

(AMSE)

will give a presentation on

Arab Spring Protests and Women’s Marriage Outcomes:

Evidence from Egypt

Abstract: The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 has triggered important socio-economic changes directly affecting women, who have played an unprecedented role in protests. However, few has been said on the consequences of exposure to Arab Spring protests on the Egyptian marriage market outcomes, notably for women. Using a novel dataset from the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey, this paper investigates the changes in marital payments, spousal characteristics and types of matches after the Arab Spring. Relying on governorate-level data, from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, on demonstrators who died during protests, I exploit the variation in local exposure intensity to run a difference-in-difference strategy. I find that an increase of exposure to protests' intensity of 1 percentage point is associated with a decline of 1.4% in the average bride price paid by the groom and his family at marriage to women married after 2011. It however increases the average deferred dower promised by the grooms in case of separation by 5.6%. This suggests that there might be a substitution effect between the two main types of marital payments. I also show that the higher exposure rises the probability of marrying a blood-related of 0.3% in most exposed governorates, which is in line with lower bride price levels.