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Dowries are wealth transfers from the bride’s family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage. Despite being illegal, dowry payments in India are widespread and often amount to several times more than a household’s annual income (Anderson 2007). Previous studies have linked dowries to gender-based violence, such as sex-selective abortion (Alfano 2017, Bhalotra et al. 2020), bride burning, dowry deaths, and other forms of intimate partner violence (Bloch and Rao 2002, Menon 2020). It has also been shown that higher dowries can increase women’s decision-making power in their marital families (Zhang and Chan 1999, Brown 2009, Calvi and Keskar 2020b).