The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa: Female Productivity and the Demand
for Wives in Cte d'Ivoire

Author(s): Hanan G. Jacoby
Source: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Oct., 1995), pp. 938-971
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan
Africa: Female Productivity and the Demand
for Wives in Cote d'Ivoire
Hanan G. Jacoby
University of Rochester
Polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa,

with important social consequences. This paper makes the first at-
tempt to link African polygyny directly to the productivity of women
in agriculture using micro data. I develop a structural model of the
demand for wives that disentangles wealth and substitution effects.
Using a large household survey from Cote d'Ivoire, I find that
marked geographic diversity in cropping patterns leads to regional
variation in female labor productivity. I also find that, conditional
on wealth, men do have more wives when women are more produc-
tive, that is, cheaper. This substitution effect may explain why polyg-
yny declined in rural areas of Cote d'Ivoire during agricultural de-
velopment.
[Polygyny] will, without question, eventually almost

completely disappear as a pattern of behavior. The new
legal codes are gradually moving towards its abolition,
This research was conducted while I was visiting the Poverty and Human Resources
division of the World Bank's Policy Research Department. I am grateful to the division
and to the government of C6te dIvoire for access to the data, as well as to Christiaan
Grootaert and the Africa Technical Department Human Resources division of the
World Bank for providing me with additional data files. Special thanks to Martha
Ainsworth for answering many questions about the CILSS. The views expressed in
this paper are mine and should not be attributed to the World Bank or to the govern-
ment of C6te dIvoire. I have also benefited from the comments of Gary Becker, Mark
Bils, Don Cox, Stan Engerman, Andrew Foster, an anonymous referee, and seminar
participants at Colorado, Penn, Princeton, Rochester, and the World Bank. The usual
disclaimer applies.
[Journal of Political Economy, 1995, vol. 103, no. 5]

? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-3808/95/0305-0008$01.50
938
ECONOMICS OF POLYGYNY 939
women will avoid it where they can, and men will not
generally be able to afford it. [GOODE 1970, p. 188]
I. Introduction
Polygyny, the taking of several wives, persists in sub-Saharan Africa

despite predictions of its demise. Throughout the "polygyny belt"
stretching from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east, as many
as a third to a half of married women are in polygynous unions. And
there is no sign of rapid decline in African polygyny (van de Walle
and Kekovole 1984; Lesthaeghe, Kaufmann, and Meekers 1989).
That the nuclearization of the African family has failed to materialize
attests to polygyny's enduring appeal. A source of this appeal, it is
often argued, is the large contribution African women make to ag-
ricultural production. In economic terminology, the high value of
female labor leads to a low shadow price of wives, so that many men
demand a plurality of wives. This paper makes the first attempt to
link African polygyny directly to the productive contribution of
women using micro data, in effect, to estimate the price elasticity of
the demand for wives.
Polygyny is not a mere cultural curiosity, but has important ramifi-
cations in sub-Saharan Africa. One way to accommodate polygyny
when the sex ratio is near unity is for women to marry young and
to remarry quickly following divorce or widowhood (Goldman and
Pebley 1989). By thus increasing the exposure of women to marriage,
polygyny may promote high fertility in the aggregate (Pebley and
Mbugua 1989), although causality undoubtedly runs in both direc-
tions.' Polygyny also tends to encourage migration, since highly po
lygynous regimes are sustained in another way by the importation of
wives from regions with less polygyny (Becker 1981), though this
practice appears to be rare in Africa (van de Walle 1968). Much more
common is the emigration of potential husbands: typically young men
who are squeezed out of rural marriage markets and end up in Afri-
can cities (Lesthaeghe et al. 1989). High urban male to female ratios
inevitably lead to de facto polyandry, as Posner (1992) euphemisti-
cally terms prostitution, with its ominous implications for the spread
of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Economists' interest in polygyny was kindled by Becker's (1974,
1981) seminal theory of marriage. The key challenges for the theory
are to explain the incidence of polygyny within a society as well as
' Polygyny appears, however, to reduce fertility within marriage, i.e., per year of
exposure. Becker (1981) hypothesizes that the polygynist has fewer resources (e.g.,
time) to devote to each wife.
940 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
why polygyny is no longer as common in many parts of the world as

it once was. Becker identifies two forces-male inequality in resources
(defined very broadly) and the marginal contribution of women-as
the principal determinants of polygyny. For example, a wealthy
farmer may have several wives not only because he can better afford
their bride-prices and maintenance than a poor farmer, but also be-
cause he faces a lower shadow price of wives; an additional wife is
more productive on his farm than on the poor man's farm. Distin-
guishing wealth and shadow price effects is clearly important. If the
wealth elasticity of demand for wives is positive and large, then eco-
nomic development could even strengthen polygyny.2 But if the elas-
ticity of demand for wives with respect to the shadow price is negative
and large, then agricultural modernization and the development of
markets, while increasing wealth, may still weaken polygyny by low-
ering the value of female labor.
Empirical research on the determinants of polygyny is sparse in-
deed. Anthropologists (e.g., Goody 1976), using highly aggregate eth-
nographic data, have found that the incidence of polygyny across
societies is positively associated with the extent of female involvement
in agriculture, a crude proxy for female productivity. Grossbard
(1976) provides the first econometric analysis of African polygyny
using household-level data. But her urban sample sheds little light
on the link between the demand for wives in sub-Saharan Africa
and their productive value in agriculture. And, though Grossbard's
findings seem to indicate that wealthier men take more wives, the
effect of greater male wealth cannot be separated from that of greater
female home productivity. The only other empirical analysis of Afri-
can polygyny based on micro data is Singh's (1988) study of about 60
agricultural households in Burkina Faso. Singh finds that farmers
with greater landholdings have more wives, and he takes this as evi-
dence of a shadow price effect. While Singh recognizes that landhold-
ings could also reflect wealth, his attempt to simultaneously control
for farm size and farm income is unsuccessful. Moreover, he treats
land and other farm assets as exogenous variables, a highly question-
able assumption when wives themselves are partly viewed as farm
assets.3
2 Polygyny can increase in the aggregate because the supply of wives is quite elastic,
as evidenced by the large variation in female age at first marriage across countries (see
Goldman and Pebley 1989). Pebley and Mbugua (1989) suggest that rising incomes
may explain why polygyny appears to have increased in Senegal over the past two
decades. However, economic growth, as noted by Becker (1974), can also affect wealth
inequality within a society and thereby alter the distribution of wives across men.
3Singh argues that farm size can be taken as exogenous in the African context
because, traditionally, land is held by the tribal or village chief and there is no land
In this paper, I develop a structural approach to estimating the

demand for wives that disentangles the wealth and shadow price ef-
fects and, at the same time,seschews these stringent exogeneity as-
sumptions. The idea is to estimate the productivity of female labor
in farm households and then relate it to the number of wives of the
household head, controlling for differences in wealth and other male
characteristics. I analyze data from a large-scale household survey
conducted in Cote d'Ivoire, a West African country with one of the
highest polygyny rates in the world. From this cross-sectional analysis
I hope to learn about the economic forces that may have shaped the
evolution of marriage patterns in Cote d'Ivoire, and in the rest of
sub-Saharan Africa, over the past several decades.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II enlarges on the eco-
nomic aspects of polygyny in sub-Saharan Africa. Section III gives a
brief history of polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire. In Section IV, I construct
a life cycle model of wife accumulation and in Section V discuss how
I estimate and identify the resulting demand function for wives. I
present the estimates of the agricultural technology in Section VI and
those of the demand for wives in Section VII. Section VIII summa-
rizes the findings and discusses their implications.
II. The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan

Africa
Boserup (1970) was the first to propose that the high incidence of
polygyny in sub-Saharan Africa is rooted in the sexual division of
labor in hoe agriculture and the large economic contribution of
women. In the bush fallow system, men generally perform the de-
manding task of clearing forests and women the lighter tasks of culti-
vating and selling food crops. Where markets for female agricultural
labor are nonexistent, as in Cote d'Ivoire and much of sub-Saharan
Africa, marriage is one of the few avenues for augmenting the house-
hold's female workforce (child fostering may be another; see Ains-
worth [1992]). Why is there no female labor market? Posner (1981)
speculates that because wives jointly produce food for themselves,
their children, and their husband, they are cheaper to supervise than
hired female workers. Labor supervision costs also figure promi-
nently in theories of sharecropping (e.g., Eswaran and Kotwal 1985),
an institution that bears a striking resemblance to marriage in sub-
market. Furthermore, individuals generally cannot increase their land allocations by

acquiring additional wives. Yet, even under traditional arrangements, a household
head can adjust his farmed area in response to a change in the number of wives, e.g.,
by fallowing land or by temporarily pledging or ceding land to another household,
and vice versa.
Saharan Africa. Overwhelmingly, African men control access to land,

and wives, in effect, pay their husband a share of agricultural output
in exchange for cultivation rights.4 As Pryor (1977, p. 118) puts it,
"if a man has extra land, in the [polygynous] society his path to wealth
lies clearly in the accumulation of wives who will work this extra land;
in the [monogamous] society accumulation of wealth can not occur
in this way but through the renting of this land to tenant farmers or
the selling of the land to others." And, in his empirical analysis of 60
primitive societies, Pryor does indeed find an inverse relationship
between land rentals and polygyny.
African marriage is, to be sure, more than just a substitute for a
tenancy contract. Traditional marriage is a transfer of a woman's
sexual and reproductive rights, in addition to her labor, from her
family to her husband, usually in exchange for money or gifts.5 The
demand for wives thus derives in large measure from the demand for
children, the perceived advantages of which include prestige, old-age
security, and heirs. Becker's theory encompasses the production of
children and also introduces the concept of marriage market equilib-
rium, in which bride-prices and the division of marital output serve
to equate the aggregate supply of and demand for wives. That high
bride-prices are typically observed in the polygynous societies of Af-
rica-compared to South Asia, for example, where dowries prevail-
reflects a high demand for wives (see also Pryor 1977).6
A final motive for polygyny, stressed by Posner (1981), is insurance
through networks of kinship (see Ben-Porath [1980] and Pollak
[1985] for more general discussions). A man might marry several
wives to form lasting ties of exchange among a large set of in-laws,
thereby compensating for a lack of credit or insurance markets. For
4 In C6te dIvoire, as elsewhere in Africa, land rights are still predominantly vested in
lineage groups rather than in individual households (Weekes-Vagliani 1985; Handloff
1991). Lineage heads cede usufruct rights to households, and these rights are in turn
passed on to either sons or nephews depending on whether descent is matrilineal, as
in Akan society, or patrilineal. In matrilineal cultures, women sometimes retain the
rights to land belonging to their own lineage, though these rights are typically weaker
than those of men. With the expansion of cocoa and coffee production, there has been
a shift to individualization of land rights.
5 The institution of bride-price is universal among C6te dIvoire's many ethnic
groups, though it varies in form (see Roberts et al. 1973). For example, some groups
prefer installment over lump-sum payments. Among the Bete, it is a lump-sum cash pay-
ment usually of about $200 (Weekes-Vagliani 1985).
6 Contrary to the assertion of Boserup (1985) and others that polygyny perpetuates
the low status of women, Becker views the bride-price as a transfer to women and
claims that laws restricting such payments, or banning polygyny itself, would be inimi-
cable to women. The fact that the bride-price is typically paid to the parents of the
bride as a compensation for their "loss" is not as damaging to this view as it sounds,
since it gives parents the incentive to invest in the human capital of their daughters
(see Cheung's [1972] illuminating analysis of Chinese marriage contracts).
example, Rosenzweig and Stark (1989) argue that exogamy in rural

India facilitates the spatial diversification of income risk and that,
therefore, the location of the spouse's family should be viewed as
endogenous. In a polygynous society, the residence and number of
in-laws might be jointly determined. I do not attempt to explicitly
model kinship networks in this paper. Rather, as with children, I
argue that insurance is one of the possible benefits of marriage, bene-
fits that husbands can obtain at a lower cost when women are more
productive in agriculture.
III. Polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire: A Brief History
Has the structure of the African family been evolving inexorably

toward the Eurasian model, as Goode (1970) and others have pre-
dicted? To uncover the historical trend in polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire,
I have pieced together a number of surveys and censuses spanning
more than three decades. Table 1 reports, when available, three mea-
sures of polygyny: the fraction of married men who are polygynists
(p), which measures the incidence of polygyny; the average number
of wives per polygynist (w), which measures its intensity; and a gen-
eral indicator, the ratio of currently married women to currently
married men (m), which confounds incidence and intensity (see
van de Walle 1968). These measures are related by the identity m =
1 + p(w - 1). Note that it was not until 1975 that the first nationwide
census was carried out in Cote d'Ivoire. Prior to that time, only re-
gional demographic surveys are available, which have limited cover-
age and are probably less reliable than census data.
As is evident from the most recent entry in table 1, polygyny is still
pervasive in Cote d'Ivoire. About 23 percent of married men prac-
ticed it in 1988, though the average polygynist had only 2.3 wives,
which is certainly no harem. The incidence of polygyny (p) was muc
higher in rural areas than in the capital city of Abidjan, and its inten-
sity (w) was about the same. However, the raw census figures con-
found behavioral differences with differences in age distributions be-
tween Abidjan and rural areas. Cities generally have larger
proportions of young people than the countryside, and younger
(married) men have fewer wives on average (see van de Walle 1968).
In fact, the 1988 census of Cote d'Ivoire indicates that m rises from
a value of 1.07 for 20-24-year-olds to a peak of 1.52 for men between
the ages of 60 and 64. Beyond age 65, men have progressively fewer
wives on average, since divorced and deceased wives are not replaced.
When I standardize the 1988 polygyny indicators by age in the next
row of table 1, the rural-urban gap narrows somewhat, as would be
expected, though it remains large.
TABLE 1
POLYGYNY IN C6TE DIVOIRE FROM CENSUS AND SURVEY DATA
ALL C6TE
ABIDJAN RURAL AREAS DIVOIRE
YEAR AND DATA SOURCE p W m p W m p W m
1955 (Abidjan census) .15 2.2 1.18

1957-58 (regional surveys) ... .* . . 1.39
1962-64 (regional surveys) ... ... 1.17 .. . 1.43
1975 (national census) .254 2.26 1.32 .238 2.26 1.30
1978 (national survey) ... ... 1.21 .. . 1.33 .243 2.3 1.31
1988 (national census) .14 2.23 1.18 .249 2.30 1.32 .226 2.30 1.29
1988 (age standardized)t .17 2.28 1.21 .245 2.29 1.31
1988 (CILSS) .122 2.15 1.14 .287 2.22 1.35 .242 2.22 1.30
SOURCE.-Republique de CUte dIvoire (1967, 1978, 1991) and Ahonzo, Barrere, and Kopylov (1984).
NOTE.-p is the ratio of polygynists to currently married men, w is the average number of wives per polygynist,
and m is the ratio of currently married women to currently married men.
* Not available from a published source.
t Based on nationwide age distribution.
Let us turn now to the historical picture. Despite explosive popula-

tion growth fueled by massive migration, both the incidence and in-
tensity of polygyny in Abidjan between 1955 and 1988 were practi-
cally unchanged. Meanwhile, polygyny appears to have declined in
rural areas of Cote d'Ivoire between the early 1960s and the mid
1970s but shows no trend thereafter.7 This recent stability in both
urban and rural polygyny is reflected in the national figures. Neither
the incidence nor the intensity of polygyny has shown a marked de-
cline between the 1975 and 1988 censuses, and so the proportion of
married women in polygynous unions (= pwlm) has remained
roughly constant at around four out of 10.
It is worth mentioning that polygyny is illegal in Cote d'Ivoire,
outlawed by the 1964 Civil Code along with other traditional practices
such as bridewealth and forced marriage. The Civil Code was an
attempt to legislate into being, or at least remove the obstacles to, the
"Western-style" nuclear family, considered a necessary condition for
economic development (Launay 1982). Yet the law contains a gaping
loophole. Only legally registered marriages are recognized, so that a
traditionally married polygynist is officially viewed as a bachelor! Lau-
nay asserts that despite early attempts to register marriages, the Code
has had no practical effect. But could the ban nonetheless have been
7The increase in rural polygyny in the late 1950s may be illusory since the two sets
of regional surveys are not strictly comparable. The 1962-64 surveys cover all of C6te
dIvoire except the sparsely populated northeast and southwest regions, so the rural
polygyny figure based on these data is probably more representative than the 1957-58
figure.
responsible for the decline in rural polygyny prior to 1975? One piece
of evidence to the contrary is the fact that polygyny has not fallen at
all in Abidjan since 1964. Enforcement of a ban on polygyny would
surely have been easier in Abidjan than in rural areas.
What happened to the Ivorian economy during the period in ques-
tion? Cote d'Ivoire experienced steady and impressive economic
growth by African standards, with per capita gross domestic product
doubling between 1960 and 1980, though the economy slumped in
the 1980s. Fueling this growth was development of the agricultural
sector, particularly the expansion of cocoa and coffee production on
small family farms, which by the mid 1970s accounted for 60 percent
of export earnings. An intriguing question, and one that I explore
later, is to what extent rapid agricultural development was responsi-
ble for the decline in rural polygyny in the 1960s.
IV. A Life Cycle Model of a Farmer's Demand

for Wives
Having now set the stage, in this section I construct a model of a

farmer's demand for wives over his life cycle. As in much of Becker's
(1974, 1981) analysis of polygyny, I ignore the matching aspect of
marriage and assume, at least initially, that the female side of the
marriage market is homogeneous. In a traditional society, with pre-
scribed female tasks and minimal human capital investment by
women, this may not be a bad approximation. Unlike Becker, I incor-
porate preferences for wives in my model. An additional modeling
issue concerns the role of credit markets in financing marriage. I
initially assume that such markets do not exist.
Husbands have preferences over their own consumption of market
goods, Cm(t); services, Z(t), produced with wives' home time (such as
cooking and child care); and the current number of wives, W(t),
which I treat as a continuous variable (e.g., wife-days). Thus u =
U[Cm(t), Z(t), W(t)], with husband's leisure ignored for simplicity. The
number of wives enters U separately by virtue of the children, pres-
tige, or sexual variety that they provide. An obvious shortcoming of
this preference specification is that the age of wives does not matter,
only their number. A preference for a young wife at some point in
the future will discourage a man from marrying all his wives early in
his life cycle. Wives may, in part, be a form of "vintage" consumption
capital, with younger vintages preferred over older ones, or it may
be that younger wives have a better chance of surviving to care for
their husband in his old age (see Kotlikoff and Spivak 1981). Unfortu-
nately, either notion is difficult to model. A simple approach is to let
the marginal utility of wives, or of Z(t), vary over the life cycle;
for example, Uw, > 0, excep

Uwt< 0.
Wives, I assume, always engage in both housework and farmwork,
and their labor is perfectly substitutable in each activity. Abstracting
once again from leisure choices, let lh(t) and lf(t) be the proportion
of wife time spent in housework and farmwork, respectively, where
lh(t) + lf(t) = 1, so that the total wife labor inputs in the two activities
are Lh(t) = W(t)lh and Lf(t) = W(t)lf. If other inputs are ignored,
home services are produced according to the concave production
function Z(t) = g(Lh). On the farm production side, I think of the
farmer as optimizing out market-purchased variable inputs at each
point in time, conditional on quasi-fixed inputs and wife labor (I
suppress male labor for now),8 giving a (concave) restricted profit
function, H(v(t), Lf(t), K(t); 0), where v(t) is the vector of input and
output prices, K(t) is the aggregate value of physical capital used on
the farm,9 and 0 is a vector of parameters reflecting the agricultural
technology, some of which may be specific to the farm. I assume that
this technology is given to the husband or adopted independently of
his marital decisions.
The division of marital output can be quite explicit in African
households, and I shall follow Becker in assuming that this division
is determined in the marriage market equilibrium along with the
bride-price, so that both are exogenous to the household. To be pre-
cise, let total household consumption C(t) = Cm(t) + Cj(t), where
Cw(t) is the consumption of all wives (and their children). Each wife
receives the same share of income +(t) so that Cj(t) = 4(t)W(t). Al-
though husbands do not directly value wives' consumption, they face
a set of "divorce constraints" requiring them to guarantee each wife
a level of utility at least as large as in her next-best marriage. Since
wives are assumed identical in preferences, these divorce constraints
are all binding; that is, husbands extract all the marital surplus from
each wife (net of the bride-price, which goes to the wife's family as
payment for the loss of her labor services). How is +(t) determined?
Suppose that each wife makes her divorce decision on the basis of
her current-period utility and that her current utility depends solely
on her consumption (I relax this later).'l Under these conditions, +(t)
8 I also ignore for now the labor input of other female household members, such as
the unmarried daughters of the household head, though I incorporate it later in the
empirical work under the presumption that all female labor, wife and nonwife, is
perfectly substitutable in production.
9 Conditioning on K(t) presupposes the absence of rental markets for capital. Open-
ing up such rental markets is equivalent in this model to allowing farmers to borrow
and lend, as I do below.
10 I do not allow a wife's current utility to depend, e.g., on the amount of time her
husband devotes exclusively to her. Doing so would needlessly complicate the model.
is fixed in the marriage market equilibrium. Finally, I assume that

wives allocate their time across home and farmwork according to
their husband's optimality conditions. Presumably, an uncooperative
wife can be returned to her kin for a refund of the bride-price (see
Becker 1981, p. 87).1"
Husbands, therefore, choose Cm(t) and lh(t) and allocate their ag-
ricultural surplus, S(t), between wives and physical capital so as to
maximize discounted lifetime utility
fo e PtU [Cm(t), g(Lh(t)), WV(t)]dt, (1)

where p is the subjective rate of time preference, subject to
S(t) = H(v(t), L1(t), K(t); 0) - Cm(t) -(t)VW(t), (2)
S(t) = K(t) + pW(t), (3)
and
K(O) = K0, W(O) = 0, K(T) = KT, W(T) = WT. (4)
Equation (2) describes the accumulation of the husband's surplus,

and equation (3) shows how he divides his surplus between the two
types of "capital." Wives and physical capital are assumed freely trans-
ferable, and p is their relative price-the bride-price-which I take
to be constant over the farmer's life cycle.'2
If time arguments are suppressed and an interior solution is as-
sumed, the first-order conditions imply
UCm = XA (5a)
UZg' = XILfI (5b)
and
UW = X(PHK + - HLf), (5c)

where X is the marginal utility of the husband's wea
(5c), the husband equates his marginal willingness to pay for a wife
at each point in time to the shadow price of a wife, which is the
marginal value of investments in physical capital he forgoes in paying
" Divorce is common in CUte dIvoire. Senoufo men, e.g., can give any reason for
divorce, including refusal of the wife to perform household tasks. Among the Akan of
CUte d'Ivoire, the grounds for divorce include bad conduct, irascibility, and "inveterate
laziness of the wife" (Roberts et al. 1973, p. 87).
12 Thus the model is analogous to the two-sector growth model of Arrow and Kurz
(1970), with S(t) as the sole state variable.
the bride-price plus the cost of retaining a wife less the marginal
product of wives' labor in agriculture. Becker's (1981) model is es-
sentially a special case of (5c) in which Uw 0 and p = 0, so that
HLf =a
This model, in which wives are a form of savings and investment,
can generate the hump-shaped life cycle wife accumulation profile
seen in the Ivorian census data. But the assumption of perfectly im-
perfect credit markets underlying the model may, at best, capture
only the constraints faced by younger men. The alternative, perfect
credit markets, is not as absurd an assumption as it sounds in the
African context when one considers the importance of informal lend-
ing (see, e.g., Udry 1990) and inter vivos transfers.'3 The ability to
borrow and lend can be incorporated into the model by introducing
a financial asset, A(t), with a constant rate of return, r. Constraints
(2) and (3) then become
8(t) = rA (t) + H(v(t), Lf (t), K(t); 0) - Cm (t) -;(t)W(t) (2')
and
S(t) = A (t) + K(t) + pW(t), (3')
implying the revised optimality conditions
Uw = X(pr + r- HLf) (5c')

and
HK= r. (5d)
Availability of credit thus separates marriage decisions from farm

capital investment decisions; the marginal product of capital no
longer appears in (5c').'4 For the stock of wives to rise over the life
cycle in this model, one must assume that men are patient (r > p);
otherwise husbands will immediately go into debt to finance the pur-
chase of all their wives at once. However, as I argued earlier, this
result is an artifact of the preference specification. Preference for
young wives over old wives can lead to an increasing stock of wives,
at least as long as Uw, > 0 or Uz, > 0.
13 Cox and Jimenez (1991) find support for the view that private transfers in C6te
d'Ivoire are a form of intergenerational exchange designed to alleviate borrowing
constraints. Also, it was traditionally the lineage elders who paid the bride-price,
as a type of loan that could be repaid in labor (Weekes-Vagliani 1985).
1 But while the overall marginal value of a wife, (UWIX) + HILf is fixed by the
marriage and credit markets, a wife's marginal product in agriculture varies across
farms. Only with an active female labor market, and perfect substitutability between
family and hired labor, would the latter also be fixed in equilibrium.
Conditions (5a), (5b), (5c'), and (5d) can be solved to obtain the
X-constant demand for wives:
Wd = Wd(pr + +, v, 0, X). (6)
This demand function decomposes marital decisions at each point in

time into a life cycle component A, summarizing all past and future
information relevant to current choices, and a component reflecting
currently observed variables. An important exclusion restriction im-
plied by the separation property of perfect credit markets is that the
capital stock does not appear in equation (6).
To formulate my central hypothesis, I assume that Cm is strongly
separable in utility from Z and W (this assumption also comes into
play in the empirical implementation). Now consider a change in an
element of 0, say a. If Z and W are not too complementary,'5 then
one can establish that
sign (dd sign(HIKjIILfK - HLfaHKK)- (7)
In other words, with the marginal utility of the husband's wealth held
constant, a change in technology reflected by an increase in (x leads
to more wives demanded provided that the right-hand side of (7) is
positive. For example, if HI is Cobb-Douglas and a is any input coeffi-
cient, then it is easy to see that the right-hand side must be positive.'6
The reason for the restriction on the degree of complementarity be-
tween Z and W is that an increase in the productivity of wives on the
farm will cause a reallocation of time out of housework into farmwork
and a corresponding fall in Z.
It is also reasonable to expect that wealthier men-for example,
men who inherit more land and hence have a lower X-will have
more wives, but it is not sufficient to assume that wives are a normal
good. Because the shadow price of wives (and of Z) is endogenously
determined, a change in wealth induces a change in the shadow price,
so that the usual price-constant income effect concept is invalid (see
Edlefsen 1981).
15 Specifically, I require that UZZ(g')2 + Uzg' + Uwzg' < 0. A sufficient condition

that Uwz s 0.
16 So far I have ignored male labor, assuming that it is inelastically supplied to
farm. Suppose, instead, that male labor, Lm, is an input in H and that male family
members also work off the farm at a constant wage (I still ignore leisure). The expres-
sion on the right-hand side of (7) then becomes HLRALfLf + HIKALfK + H1LmALtm,
where the A's are the cofactors of the (3 x 3) matrix of second partials of HI. Not
surprisingly, the effect of a change in technology now depends on the substitutability
between male labor and the other inputs. However, in the Cobb-Douglas example just
given, since all the A's are positive, the effect of the technological change on the number
of wives demanded is again positive.
I close this section by examining the consequences of heterogeneity,

first in the "nonproductive" attributes of husbands, such as physical
attractiveness, ability to protect wives, and so forth. Recall that in
considering the divorce constraint, I assumed that each wife's marital
utility depends only on her consumption in the marriage. If her utility
also depends on these nonproductive attributes, then better-endowed
husbands need not provide each wife with as much consumption to
satisfy the divorce constraint. In other words, 4) is decreasing in the
husband's endowment. As + declines, the husband feels wealthier
and the shadow price of wives falls, thereby increasing the number
of wives demanded.
Finally, consider heterogeneity of wives, for example, differences
in education levels. If educated wives are more desirable or education
enhances home production, then husbands will have to pay more for
a better-educated wife. The bride-price, p, becomes a hedonic price
function that depends on a vector of wife characteristics. Husbands
will trade off quantity and quality of wives, and the marginal price of
quality enters the demand function for quantity of wives. For reasons
already stated, this quantity-quality trade-off may be of only limited
importance in the rural African context, but, at the very least, wife
characteristics should not be treated as exogenous variables in the
empirical work.'7
V. Estimation Strategy
A. The COte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey
Between 1985 and 1988, a series of four high-quality nationwide

household surveys were collected in Cote d'Ivoire under the auspices
of the World Bank (see Ainsworth and Mufioz [1986] for a descrip-
tion). With detailed information on household expenditures and all
income-generating activities, including agriculture, the Cote d'Ivoire
Living Standards Survey (CILSS) provides a unique opportunity to
study the economic aspects of polygyny. A cluster sampling design
was used, so that rural households are grouped by geographical units
corresponding to villages. In addition, the survey includes a rotating
panel: in the first year, approximately 1,600 households were drawn
at random, half of which were retained for resurvey the following
year along with 800 new households. In principle, this scheme should
have provided 2,400 2-year panel observations for 1985-86,
1986-87, and 1987-88. In practice, the attrition rate across years
was quite low, only about 12 percent.
17 In the empirical work, I implicitly assume that the marginal prices of wife charac-
teristics are constant across potential husbands.
Although the CILSS ascertains the marital status of all household

members, I focus on male household heads. Since temporary migra-
tion is common in Cote d'Ivoire, it is important to match husbands
to their "primary" households, and the CILSS always collects infor-
mation about the head. On the other hand, household heads may be
somewhat older and thus have more wives than the average adult
male in the sample. To assess how accurately polygyny is captured in
the CILSS data, the bottom row of table 1 reports the polygyny indi-
cators for the 1,212 married household heads in the 1988 survey.
Unlike the 1985-87 surveys, the 1988 CILSS uses the same sampling
frame as the 1988 census, so the two sets of indicators are directly
comparable.'8 Indeed, they are not far apart: the CILSS and unstan-
dardized census give virtually the same m for the country as a whole,
and the Abidjan and rural numbers are reasonably close as well.
B. Estimating the Agricultural Technology
Consider the conditional profit function
1it = V? (Lmit + 1)am(l) (Lfit + 1)aAxc)(K-t + 1)Pe~i+ti, (8

where vi is an index of (normalized) input prices faced by farmer i
in year t, Ki is now a representative capital input, Lmjt and Lfit are
the total male and female family labor inputs, px, is the unobserved
farmer-specific productive endowment, and Eit is an independently
and identically distributed (i.i.d.) productivity shock. This modified
Cobb-Douglas form restricts Lmit and Lfit to be imperfect substitutes,
as is consistent with a sexual division of labor, though none of the
inputs is essential for positive profit. A further advantage of the
Cobb-Douglas form, besides parsimony and linearity in parameters
(once logs of [8] are taken), is that it implies that the right-hand side
of (7) is positive, thus giving the estimated parameters of the demand
for wives a theoretical interpretation. To reproduce the desired com-
parative statics experiment empirically, I allow the labor productivity
parameters, otm and af, to depend linearly on a vector of cluster char-
acteristics, Xc. In particular, I let the kth element of Xc be the fraction
of total area cultivated in cluster c devoted to crop k. These cluster-
level crop shares are designed to capture regional variation in agricul-
tural technology, that is, in the mix of tasks that men and women do,
and thus in the productive contribution of male and female farm
labor.
18 Coulombe and Demery (1993) show that the CILSS oversampled large households
in 1985-87, so that polygyny indicators would be higher in these years, which they
are.
A major concern in estimating equation (8) in logarithmic form is

that unobserved heterogeneity, embodied in the error component p
may be correlated with the observed inputs. The CILSS panel feature
enables me to purge pi by taking first-differences, which is equivalent
to a fixed-effects estimator in a 2-year panel. Differencing also elimi-
nates the log of the input prices, provided that these prices do not
change across years (i.e., vi = vi). In a 2-year panel, this assumption
is probably not unreasonable, though I do allow for region-year ef-
fects in the estimation. If first-differences are denoted by A and logs
by lowercase letters, (8) becomes
A/iT = otm (Xc)Almit + of(Xc) A lfit +A k+ Eiii t (9)

where
cK1(XC) = ajo + E aMkXck, j m,f.

k
Although ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of (9) are consistent

in the presence of fixed effects, a remaining problem is measurement
error. Differencing tends to accentuate the usual attenuation bias.
Labor inputs are likely to be particularly susceptible. A related but
separate issue is that ex post adjustment by the farmer may induce a
correlation between the labor inputs and the transitory shock.'9 I
adopt an instrumental variables scheme to address both of these po-
tential biases.
In addition to estimates of male and female productivity, cm(Xc)
and of(Xc), equation (9) provides an estimate of the fixed effect,
mi = pi + 8 ln(vi), which captures permanent farmer characteristics,
such as farming skills and land quality, as well as differences in input
prices across villages. One way to estimate i is by taking the average
of the year t and year t - 1 profit function residuals. However, in a
2-year panel, i.i.d. shocks (and measurement error) are unlikely to
wash out by averaging. Instead, I use the year t profit function resid-
ual as an estimate of i and deal with the obvious measurement error
problem using instrumental variables. With a vector, 0 = (&m(X),
Af(XC), Ai), of farm-varying agricultural technology parameter esti-
mates in hand, we can proceed to the next step of the analysis.
C. The Demand for Wives
To estimate the demand for wives, recall first that Cm = C - XW,

and hence by (5a) and the separability assumption made earlier, we
19 I assume that decisions about nonlabor inputs, such as how much land to cultivate
in a given year, are made prior to the realization of si.
have X = Ucm(C - fW). Substituting for X in (6) and solving for W

gives Wd = Wd(pr + +, v, 0, C),20 a first-order approximation of
which forms the basis for my empirical specification (cf. Altonji [1986]
in the context of labor supply). With perfect mobility of physical
capital and wives across villages,2' r, p, and + are constants. Replacing
0 by its predicted value and given data on total household consump-
tion expenditures (Ci), I then estimate
Wid =OYo + _YL (XC) + Y2 m(Xc) + Y3m + Y4ln(Ci) + 5Ck + ui,

(10)
where Ck and u- represent, respectively, observed and unobserved

heterogeneity in the preference for wives. Also included in the vector
1i are nonproductive endowments of the husband through their ef-
fect on +, as discussed earlier. In contrast to Grossbard (1976), I do
not include wife characteristics in (10) because they are endogenously
determined. Given the Cobb-Douglas form of the profit function, the
comparative statics result (7) (see also n. 16) implies that 'Y, Y2, Y3 >
0.22 One would also expect that 4 > 0, although this is not an implica-
tion of the model.
There are two potentially endogenous variables in equation (10).
The first is household consumption expenditures, since men with a
strong preference for wives (a high u-) forgo consumption to marry
more women. Additionally, larger households have higher expendi-
tures and also tend to have more wives in them. A natural set of
instruments in this case is the cluster-level crop shares, Xc, since they
should both predict wealth and be uncorrelated with an individual
farmer's tastes. In contrast, the farmer's own landholdings or value
of farm assets may not be valid instruments because they reflect ag-
ricultural investments made conditional on the size or sex composi-
tion of the family labor force and hence conditional on ui. Note also
that, although Xc already enters equation (10), it does so only through
& (XC), j = m, f. Since these variables are linear combinations of the
k - 1 linearly independent elements of Xc (recall that the k crop
20 Without the separability assumption, X would be a function of 0 as well as C and

W. Consequently, the impact of changes in 0 on W, conditional on C, could no longer
be interpreted as a pure price effect, but rather as a combination of price and wealth
effects.
21 Women are indeed quite mobile in Cote dIvoire. According to my calculations
based on the CILSS, about a quarter of all women have migrated for reasons of
marriage.
22 On the hypothesis that 3 > 0, note that variation in farmers' prod

ments and variation in input prices, both captured in mi, have neutral eff
by assumption, so an increase in mi from whatever source raises the m
of both labor and capital. The right-hand side of (7) is thus positive.
shares in Xc sum to one), w

disposal. The second endogenous variable in equation (10) is the year
t profit function residual, because it is an error-ridden estimate of mi.
Using the lagged residual as an instrument here produces consistent
estimates provided that Eft (and measurement error) is i.i.d.
The last estimation issue to contend with is that of standard errors
in equation (10). Since the parameter vector 0 is estimated in a previ-
ous step, conventional standard error will understate the true sam-
pling variance. Murphy and Topel (1985) offer a simple formula to
correct the covariance matrix of the -y's.
VI. Estimation of Agricultural Technology
A. Geographic Variation in Agricultural Technology
Though cocoa and coffee dominate the rural economy of Cote

d'Ivoire's forest region, farmers also cultivate such food crops as
yams, cassavas, plantains, rice, and maize. In the savannah region,
cotton and peanuts are important, with millet and sorghum more
prevalent further north. Since I rely on geographic variation in the
agricultural technology to identify the demand for wives, it is worth
asking just how much of the variation in labor usage across clusters
can be explained by technological differences. So, in table 2, for each
of the 158 clusters with multiple farm households in the 1985-88
CILSS, I calculate mean values of the male and female agricultural
labor input (see the definition in subsection B) and of total cultivated
area, and I take the ratio of the two. I then regress these labor to
land ratios on the elements of Xc, defined as the fractions of tota
area cultivated in each cluster devoted to 13 crops: cocoa, coffee,
cassavas, yams/sweet potatoes, maize, rice, plantains/bananas, cotton,
peanuts, vegetables, oil palms, millet/sorghum, taro, and a residual
category containing assorted other crops. Because these fractions sum
to one, I drop the cocoa category so that the OLS coefficient estimates
in table 2 should all be interpreted relative to cocoa.
Differences in crop composition do explain a sizable fraction of
intercluster variation in male and female labor usage per hectare,
and even more so for females than for males. The standard F-statistic
tests the hypothesis that all crop shares have the same impact on labor
intensity, and it rejects the null decisively for both males and females.
Observe that men do not appear to be involved exclusively in the
production of modern export crops, as is evidenced by the significant
coefficients on yams and rice in the male equation. The point esti-
mates in table 2 reveal how shifting land toward the production of
TABLE 2
DETERMINANTS OF CLUSTER-LEVEL MALE AND FEMALE LABOR INTENSITY

(CILSS, 1985-88)
Regressor Mean (S.D.) Male Hours/Hectare Female Hours/Hectare
Constant ... 168.8 137.3

(1.73) (1.27)
Cocoa .161
(.177)
Coffee .166 -109.5 - 23.9
(.168) (.77) (.15)
Yams/sweet potatoes .112 1,178 1,953
(.120) (5.98) (8.93)
Cassavas .086 - 164.3 1,401
(.086) (.71) (5.46)
Maize .110 278.4 - 198.7
(.087) (1.03) (.67)
Rice .098 879.3 685.1
(.112) (4.51) (3.17)
Bananas/plantains .051 -746.9 -604.8
(.062) (2.33) (1.70)
Cotton .040 240.8 268.2
(.109) (1.32) (1.33)
Peanuts .040 836.4 16.4
(.063) (2.42) (.04)
Vegetables .035 88.1 - 1,432
(.052) (.23) (3.41)
Oil palms .020 481.6 431.7
(.046) (1.21) (.98)
Millet/sorghum .017 60.7 1,834
(.051) (.13) (3.52)
Taro .016 848.0 1,915
(.026) (1.15) (2.34)
Other crops .048 494.5 -249.3
(.083) (1-98) (.90)
R 2 .487 .605
F(13,144) 10.5 17.0
NOTE.-Absolute t-values of OLS estimates are in parentheses. There are 158 clusters in the sample. Dependent
variables are ratios of mean labor input in cluster to mean cultivated area (means: 441 (267) for males and 508
(339) for females). Independent variables are the fraction of total cultivated area in a cluster devoted to each crop.
cocoa would alter the sexual division of labor on the farm. For exam-
ple, reallocating 1 percent of land area from the cultivation of yams,
a traditional crop, toward cocoa reduces female labor hours per hect-
are by 3.8 percent but reduces male labor hours per hectare by only
2.7 percent. More dramatic male-female differences are found with
peanuts, taro, millet/sorghum, and vegetables. Of course, while the
large geographic variations in labor intensity underlying these esti-
mates are suggestive, they do not imply large productivity differ-
ences. For this we need to estimate the agricultural technology.
B. Variables and Sample for Profit Function
Because of Cote d'Ivoire's agricultural diversity, I define farm profit

as all crop and animal product revenue (including consumption of
home production) net of expenditures on variable inputs, such as
seeds, fertilizer, and hired labor (see Oh and Venkataraman 1992).23
Generally speaking, the technological level of Ivorian agriculture is
low, even for cash crops, and the short-handled hoe remains the most
important implement. I take the following inputs to be predeter-
mined with respect to the realization of Efi: area under mature cocoa
trees, area under mature coffee trees, other cultivated land area, the
value of farm equipment, the value of tools, the value of livestock,
and the fraction of total hectares held as fallow land. The latter vari-
able may reflect soil fertility.24 Labor inputs consist of total yearly
male and female hours in own farmwork plus hours spent in food
commerce. Women are heavily involved in selling food in Cote
d'Ivoire (see Vijverberg 1988), and since crop output is valued at
local market prices, this labor input rightfully belongs in the condi-
tional profit function.25
Panel households are selected only if they report farm income in
both years, resulting in a sample of 1,226 households. Means of all
variables (in levels) for this sample are shown in column 1 of table 3.
C. Results
In table 3, I explore the estimation issues outlined in the previous

section by imposing the restrictions otjk = 0 for k > 0, j = m, f (se
eq. [9]). The advantage of doing so is that tests for input exogeneity
are likely to have much more power in this restricted model than
in the fully interacted model of equation (9) with its many more
endogenous variables. On the other hand, if these interaction terms
actually belong in the production function, then a rejection of exo-
geneity on this restricted model may reflect omitted variable bias. For
this reason, I retest some of the exogeneity restrictions in the fully
interacted model.
23 Data are available on expenditures rather than on hours for hired (presumably
male) labor. In netting out these labor costs, I am implicitly assuming that hired and
family labor are imperfect substitutes.
24 Bush fallow, in which fields are left fallow for up to 10 years to restore fertility,
is still the prevailing system of food crop cultivation in Cote d'Ivoire. The proportion
of land left fallow is an indicator of the length of the fallow period and should thus
serve as a proxy for soil fertility.
25 There are many cases of zero input values, which is why I have added one to the
input levels in (8). In the case of male and female labor, the inputs of primary inter-
est, only about 6 percent of the observations have zero values.
TABLE 3
RESTRICTED COBB-DOUGLAs AGRICULTURAL PROFIT FUNCTION ESTIMATES

(CILSS, 1985-88)
LEVELS FIRST-DIFFERENCES
Mean (S.D.) GLS OLS 2SLS 2SLS

REGRESSOR (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Land area under mature 1.22 .380 .268 .253 .251

cocoa (hectares) (3.20) (13.2) (4.73) (4.37) (4.28)
Land area under mature 1.59 .288 .294 .281 .280
coffee (hectares) (3.60) (11.0) (5.94) (5.55) (5.45)
Other land area cultivated 5.46 .391 .287 .277 .274
(hectares) (5.51) (17.0) (8.16) (7.72) (7.50)
Value of equipment 34.5 .0107 .0036 .0047 .0045
(205) (2.79) (.57) (.72) (.69)
Value of tools 49.7 .149 .0861 .0912 .0874
(35.2) (7.58) (2.93) (3.01) (2.72)
Value of livestock 91.3 .0044 .0046 .0032 .0027
(309) (1.51) (1.03) (.68) (.56)
Fraction of land fallow .331 .407 .353 .362 .368
(.282) (7.60) (4.58) (4.62) (4.62)
Male labor hours 3,045 .0535 .0336 .122 .123
(2,507) (6.88) (2.28) (3.50) (1.95)
Female labor hours 3,474 .0871 .0584 .0627 .0891
(2,921) (11.5) (4.08) (2.04) (1.31)
Number of observations 2,452 2,452 1,226 1,226 1,226

X2 test . . . 51.6* 38.4t 8.55f 3.12?
[Degrees of freedom] [1] [9] [2] [2]
R2 ... ... .144 .138 .129
NOTE.-Absolute t-values are in parentheses. The dependent variable in all the regressions is log farm profit
(mean farm profit is 818 (829)). All monetary values are denominated in thousands of 1985 CFA (francs issued by
the African Financial Community). All means pertain to levels as opposed to logs.
* HO: No household error component. The generalized least squares (GLS) regression includes a constant; region-
year interaction dummies (regions: east forest, west forest, and savannah); age of household head; years of schooling
of the most educated farmworker; and cluster-level crop shares (calculated from leave-out means) of cocoa, coffee,
yams/sweet potatoes, cassavas, maize, rice, plantains/bananas, cotton, peanuts, vegetables, oil palms, millet/sorghum,
and taro.
t HO: Inputs are uncorrelated with the household fixed effect. The OLS regression includes region dummies
(see n. *).
*HO: Male and female labor are exogenous (no measurement error). The 2SLS regression includes region
dummies (see n. *). The instrument set includes the change in the number of male and female farmworkers and
lagged values of all inputs except male and female labor and the area under mature cocoa and coffee (see n. 27).
I Ho: Male and female labor are exogenous (no measurement error or ex post adjustment). The 2SLS regression
includes region dummies (see n. *). The instrument set is the same as in n. f except that it excludes the change in
the number of male and female farmworkers.
I first estimate a household random effects model, which includes

region-year interaction dummies, head's age, the maximum educa-
tion of farmworkers, and the full set of crop shares already men-
tioned. In this and all subsequent regressions, I calculate the crop
shares by taking the cluster "leave-out" mean (i.e., omitting the
farmer's own value) of area cultivated of crop k and divide it by the
cluster leave-out mean of total area cultivated. All input coefficients
reported in column 2 of table 3 have positive and highly significant
coefficients (except in the case of livestock). Also, female labor seems

to contribute a substantially larger share to farm profit than male
labor. The same is true of the first-differenced OLS estimates in col-
umn 3 of table 3,26 though both male and female labor coefficients
are lower than the random effects estimates. Overall, the random
effects model is resoundingly rejected in favor of the first-differenced
model, suggesting that unobserved heterogeneity is an important
source of bias.
Next, I consider the endogeneity of the male and female labor
inputs. One would think that family labor inputs are relatively easy
to adjust in response to productivity shocks (e.g., drought or bush-
fires). At the same time, hours worked are likely to be measured with
considerable error. If measurement error is the only problem, then
the number of farmworkers should make good instruments for total
hours, since recall errors in the former are probably small, or at least
smaller than in hours worked. Thus, in column 4 of table 3, I include
in the instrument set lagged inputs (excluding family labor),27 the
lagged number of male and female farmworkers, and the change in
the number of male and female farmworkers between the two years.
Note that the coefficient on male labor rises as we would expect in
the presence of measurement error in that input, whereas the female
labor coefficient is hardly affected. The joint exogeneity of the labor
inputs can be rejected at the 5 percent significance level. Of course,
a change in the number of male or female farmworkers may reflect
an ex post adjustment to a transitory shock, so in column 5 I exclude
these two variables from the instrument set. The estimates, though
considerably less precise,28 are not substantially affected. Measure-
ment error in the male labor input thus appears to bias downward
estimates of the male contribution to agricultural production; in fact,
after one instruments, men contribute more than women.
I now allow the male and female productivity parameters to vary
in the sample by interacting the changes in male and female log hours
26 Since I could not reject homoskedasticity using the White (1980) test (p-value = .68
I use OLS standard errors to calculate t-values.
27 I also do not use lagged area under mature cocoa and area under mature coffee
as instruments because their inclusion led to a rejection of the overidentifying restric-
tions at the 5 percent significance level (perhaps because these variables are correlated
with the interactions between changes in the labor inputs and crop composition, which
I omit from this regression). The test of overidentifying restrictions is constructed by
regressing the two-stage least squares (2SLS) residuals on the full set of instruments,
and it yields only a X() = 10.2 for the current specification.
28 While the F-tests for the excluded instruments in the previous first-stage regres-
sions were F(9,1,206) = 31.8 for male labor and F(9,1,206) = 40.3 for female labor, wi
the smaller instrument set they fall to F(7,1,208) = 1 1.3 and F(7,1,208) = 9. 1, respective
though they are still highly significant.
with the crop shares. For the sake of precision, I fold taro, oil palms,
and millet/sorghum into the other crop category, since none of these
three crops accounts for more than 2 percent of cultivated area;29
this leaves 10 interaction terms to estimate for each type of labor (i.e.,
ctjkI i = m, f, k = 1, . . ., 10), with cocoa again the excluded crop.
Columns 1 and 3 of table 4 report OLS estimates of the Otmk and
tfk, respectively, based on equation (9).30 The F-tests for the joint
significance of the oKjk, shown at the bottom of the table, reject the
restrictions, maintained in table 3, that o0jk = 0, though the rejection
is weaker for males than it is for females. The a?k should be inter-
preted as the change in the contribution to farm profit of labor of
type j when land is allocated away from the production of cocoa (the
reference crop) to crop k. The estimates show that such reallocations
can have quite different effects on the productivity of men and
women. For example, a shift of 1 percent of total land area over to
yam production raises the female contribution by 11 percent, while
lowering the male contribution by 5 percent. Similar differences ob-
tain for other food crops such as maize, rice, and peanuts. Meanwhile,
neither male nor female labor productivity would be significantly af-
fected by reallocating land between cocoa and coffee, which have
similar production technologies; nor would a shift toward cotton, a
savannah cash crop, have any such effect.
To deal with the attenuation bias in the male labor coefficient
found in table 3, I estimate the unrestricted model by 2SLS, treating
as endogenous the change in male hours and its 10 interactions with
the crop shares. On the basis of my nonrejection of exogeneity for
the female labor input in table 3, I do not instrument any of the
terms involving the change in female hours. Identification is secured
in this case by adding to the instrument set interactions between the
crop shares and the change in the number of male workers.3' Not
only are the excluded instruments highly significant in all the first-
stage regressions, but I cannot reject the overidentifying restrictions
at the 5 percent level (see n. 27). Nonetheless, the estimates of the
atmk, which I do not report here, are jointly insignificant (p-value =
29 When separate interactions between the shares of these three crops and male and
female labor are included in the profit function, none is significantly different from
zero.
30 Here, as with the restricted Cobb-Douglas estimates in table 3, unobserved het-
erogeneity leads to severe biases; the random effects specification (not reported) is
strongly rejected in favor of the first-differenced OLS model (X(229) = 82).
31 also estimated this model treating both male and female labor terms as endoge-
nous, adding to the instrument set interactions between the change in the number of
female workers and the crop shares. In this case, the Wu-Hausman test produced a
value of 19.2, which is unremarkable coming from a X(22)-
TABLE 4
UNRESTRICTED AGRICULTURAL PROFIT FUNCTION ESTIMATES (CILSS, 1985-88)
MALE LABOR (Alm) FEMALE LABOR (Alf)
OLS 2SLS OLS 2SLS

REGRESSOR (1) (2) (3) (4)
Al.* .185 ... -.163 -.129

(1.45) (1.39) (1.09)
Cocoa x Al.' ... ... ... ...
Coffee x Aj. - .157 ... .184 .089
(.80) (1.00) (.48)
Yams/sweet potatoes X Ali - .221 ... .690 .524
(1.13) (2.53) (1.92)
Cassavas x Ali .526 ... .373 .405

(1.72) (1.13) (1.23)
Maize x Ali .662 ... -.595 -.494
(2.09) (2.06) (1.76)
Rice X ll -.492 ... .473 .434
(2.07) (2.73) (2.54)
Plantains/bananas x Ali - 1.12 - 2.19 .877 .814
(2.12) (2.29) (1.84) (1.69)
Cotton X Ali .059 ... .036 .007
(.22) (.11) (.021)
Peanuts x Ali -.564 ... 1.29 1.21
(1.41) (3.47) (3.35)
Vegetables x li -1.51 - 1.41 -.322 -.324
(3.20) (2.05) (.68) (.66)
Other crops x Ali - .357 ... .160 .070
(1.23) (.69) (.31)
p-values (Ho: no
interactions) .0155 .0214 .0031 .0061
NOTE.-Absolute t-values are in parentheses. Dependent variable is log farm profit. Regressions also include
region dummies and all nonlabor inputs in table 3. Sample size is 1,226. 2SLS treats only the change in male labor
and interactions with crop shares as endogenous. Instruments include all those in n. t of table 3 plus interactions
of crop shares with the change in number of male farmworkers.
* Yearly change in log of farm labor hours of type j = m, f.
Interaction between Ali and cluster-level crop share (cocoa is the excluded crop).
.32). I therefore set to zero any amk with an individual p-value ex-
ceeding .10, which leaves only the plantain/banana and vegetable
interactions. The resulting specification is reported in columns 2 and
4 of table 4.
Finally, note that with either the OLS or 2SLS estimates, there are
many cases of negative predicted values for o0m(Xc) or Cof(X,), ev
though the mean values correspond quite closely to the estimates of
tmo and CXfo in table 3. But it is well known that flexible functio
forms do not guarantee positive marginal products at every data
point. Since, for my purposes, the variation in these parameters is
more important than the levels, I do not exclude the negative cases.
VII. Estimation of the Demand for Wives
A. A Reduced-Form Analysis
Before proceeding with the structural estimation, I present a simple

regression that shows how wives are distributed across men in Cote
d'Ivoire. My initial sample of 2,871 male household heads excludes
the entire first year of the CILSS because two important variables are
unavailable in the 1985 survey, religion of the head and his height.
Physical stature might be viewed as one of the husband's "nonproduc-
tive" attributes, although height has also been shown to be positively
associated with labor productivity (see Thomas and Strauss 1992). In
addition to height and religion, I consider the head's age and age
squared, years of schooling, ethnic group, and region of residence.
Column 1 of table 5 displays the means of these variables.
Column 2 of table 5 presents the OLS estimates of the wives regres-
sion. Since only about 12 percent of the men in the sample are unmar-
ried (or at least have no wives who currently belong to the household),
Tobit estimation is not essential.32 The results show that the average
household head in Cote d'Ivoire continues to accumulate wives until
about age 60, which is just in line with the census figures reported
earlier. Better-educated heads have fewer wives, but the effect is not
significant (only 39 percent of heads have any schooling whatsoever;
just 22 percent in rural areas). However, before one can say whether
or not male education discourages polygyny, one must condition, as
I do shortly, on wealth.33 The same can be said (with the sign re-
versed) for height, which has a positive and highly significant effect
in the wives regression. In this case, one can argue that richer parents
produce better-nourished and, thus, taller children on average; at
the same time, wealth is correlated across generations, so that height
merely picks up omitted husband's wealth. Religion is also an impor-
tant determinant of polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire. Moslems have more
wives on average than either Animists (the excluded category) or
Christians, 16 percent of whom are polygynous. Ethnic group effects
are also statistically significant, and all are positive relative to the
excluded category of non-Ivorians. The broad regional dummies con-
firm what we have already seen in the census figures, namely a large
rural-urban difference in polygyny.
32 A count data model would probably be the most appropriate in the present con-
text, except that endogenous right-hand-side variables have not yet been incorporated
into such models.
33 In an earlier version of this paper, I included the husband's wage earnings in the
wives regression, but it did not attract a significant coefficient. The problem with
including this variable is that earnings depend on hours worked, which may be corre-
lated with preferences for wives. Wages are immune from this criticism but are avail-
able for barely a third of the sample.
S ; o ?~~~~~~~~~~~~) tSCT 00 0)zG AC -SG
= t I) 0) e M CI - rI - 0 0 O M O K t - -
C' Q ACCC W CW C WI- I- t I
=0
ri2
:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~C O
o : - C 0
X ; 00O 00z-O-t 00 b t- C- GA O o Cs 4 ci 00 C
Q. t N-o-b-o- C z-
oo
00 _
a~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~o a
'o r- . . * 00 tSo0C - e?
cg en _ t
- D W 0 . e . . . .
* . 4 * _ 0 0 i o
_~~~~~~~~K
.C _ Op
. cCWd
0. _
0~~~~~~~~0C
z v _~~~
0~~~~~~
E 0 bO CZ U >
04
zZbl > -.
4, ;
962
< _GW _t _s _O _ _~cn _ 0 C) t- C
E .
C) X0
?) cn
On-O0
c oo GW an
C GW4 anO00
G n an C 0*c * * * O C
z ****
0 0
s _ s _ s _ cn _ t _ ~~~~~00 _ * * * <
O CX G 00 a) CX0 XO *?G
cn inO r- CXO 00 * t- * - *
I n _ 0 cn4 -44 I ~ -/4 GW4 - _e _/I in(
qw L
Sw 3
0 0 *13
_ ;
C, C 3
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~IO cq nG WsG Wz W<G .
<? 0
t z < b 00 00 t O t CX O . oO ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_
CZ V ~ ~ z O _ s
.l * 0 O ,
W~~~~~~~~~~~~S bo v 4
0~~ ~ ~~~~~ 0 0
CZ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CZ O
CZ ? . 'A o : Q 2 ;
963
B. Results from the Structural Model
For the structural model I need a measure of total household expen-

ditures. I use a 2-year average (for the panel households) of the
deflated expenditure aggregate described in Oh and Venkataraman
(1992), which consists of both food (including consumption of home
production) and nonfood expenditures (including imputed rent and
the use value of durables). I use the cluster-level crop shares, con-
structed from leave-out means, as instruments. In addition, I use the
lagged profit function residual and, for extra precision, the interac-
tions between the lagged residual and the crop shares. Though one
might argue that the crop shares are correlated with communitywide
preferences for wives, I would maintain that most of the preference
variation across communities is picked up by the religion and ethnic
group dummy variables. As for the sample, I again use the agricul-
tural households in the panel, selecting those with a male head and
with nonmissing data. The 1,057 men in this sample have an average
of 1.39 wives, and only about 8 percent are unmarried. Sample means
are presented in column 3 of table 5.
Columns 4 and 5 of table 5 report the 2SLS estimates of equation
(10), based on the two sets of profit function estimates in table 4.
Specification I uses the OLS estimates of male and female productiv-
ity and the profit function residual; specification II uses the 2SLS
estimates, and the results are similar. In particular, as predicted by
the theory, all three of the estimated technology parameters have
positive, and statistically significant, coefficients. Curiously, though
not inconsistent with the model, the estimated effect of a given
change in male agricultural productivity, atm(Xc), on the number of
wives demanded is almost the same as the effect of the same change
in female productivity.
In addition to the effects of variation in agricultural technology
operating through the shadow price of wives, there is also a significant
wealth effect on the demand for wives. Not surprisingly, richer men,
as captured by their household expenditures,34 have more wives.
Male schooling, on the other hand, has only a weak deterrent effect
on polygyny, even after one conditions on wealth; but, after all, these
men average less than a year of formal schooling. Meanwhile, taller
men still appear to be more polygynous than shorter men, with wealth
and any productive effects of physical stature captured in the profit
3' The first-stage regression for the log of total household expenditures has a good
overall fit (R2 = .44), and the excluded instruments are highly significant (F(27,1,016) =
20.2). The significance of the latter test is slightly exaggerated because two exclusion
restrictions are lost because of the fact that the estimated aj (X,) are linear combinations
of the crop shares.
function fixed effec

my hypothesis that "attractive" men face a lower shadow price of
wives.
Finally, significant religious (though not ethnic) differences in the
incidence of polygyny persist even after one controls for wealth and
prices in table 5. One possible explanation for this finding that is
consistent with the economic model has to do with religious endog-
amy in Cote d'Ivoire. With limited intermarriage, the extent of polyg-
yny among a religious group is determined by the distribution of
resources within that group. If, for example, wealth inequality is
greater among Moslems than it is among Catholics, then it is easier
for a wealthy Moslem to compete away a wife from the poorest man
in his marriage market than it is for an equally wealthy Catholic to
do so. Hence, there will be more polygyny among Moslems than
among Catholics, and more Moslem bachelors as well. But because
bachelors are relatively unlikely to form households of their own,
they will be underrepresented in my sample of household heads.
Consequently, if this story is true (and it of course begs the question
of why wealth inequality differs by religion in the first place), then
Moslems in my sample will appear to have more wives, on average,
than Catholics, conditional on wealth. However, the group differ-
ences in wealth distributions underlying this discrepancy will not be
detectable, because it is precisely the bachelors in the left tails of these
distributions who are underrepresented in my sample.
VIII. Conclusions and Implications
In this paper I formulate and test an economic theory of polygyny,

a theory with antecedents in the work of Becker and Boserup. My
empirical findings support Becker's emphasis on inequality across
men within a marriage market in explaining polygyny. I look at three
separate sources of inequality. First, men with greater wealth, as prox-
ied by consumption, have more wives. In fact, under the assumption
that consumption is proportional to wealth, the estimates imply that
a doubling of wealth will cause the average Ivorian farmer to demand
an additional one-quarter of a wife. This positive wealth effect means
that men in the right tail of the wealth distribution are not only able
but willing to compete away wives from men in the left tail. Second,
conditional on wealth, men with more productive farms, as measured
by their agricultural profit function fixed effect, have more wives.
That is, wives are attracted to husbands on whose farms their labor
is more productive. Not only does this finding substantiate the role
of male inequality, but it also suggests that the productive contribu-
tion of women is important. Third, taller men have more wives.
Whether height captures the husband's physical attractiveness, his

ability to protect his wives, or something else, its effect further sup-
ports the link between male inequality, broadly defined, and po-
lygyny.
Most important, this paper provides perhaps the first direct evi-
dence based on micro data regarding Boserup's famous hypothesis
linking polygyny to women's role in agricultural production. Cote
d'Ivoire is characterized by marked geographic diversity in cropping
patterns, and my estimates reveal considerable variability in female,
and to some extent male, labor productivity. I find that women's
productivity is relatively high in regions with a large proportion of
land devoted to certain food crops-particularly yams, peanuts, rice,
and plantains-compared to regions growing mainly cocoa and cof-
fee. The relationship between female productivity and the number
of wives taken by household heads lends support to Boserup's general
thesis: men do have more wives when female labor contributes a
larger share to agricultural income.35
Can changes in Cote d'Ivoire's agricultural sector account for the
modest decline in rural polygyny seen during the 1960s and early
1970s? Lacking detailed time-series data, I can only speculate. As
figure 1 shows, cocoa production, as well as cultivated area, grew by
leaps and bounds from 1960 to the mid 1980s. A similar but less
dramatic pattern is observed for coffee in figure 2. Yet, figure 3 shows
that, prior to 1975, production growth of major food staples (yams,
cassavas, rice, and maize) was extremely flat. My profit function esti-
mates thus suggest that during this period the contribution of female
labor to agricultural production may have been declining.36 Indeed,
Boserup (1970) and a number of anthropologists (e.g., Guyer 1980)
argue that the expansion of export crops has diminished the role of
women in agriculture, presumably by diverting land and male labor
away from food crop production.37 So, wives may have literally be-
come dearer in Cote d'Ivoire during the 1960s, which would have
35 My findings admit an alternative interpretation as well, which is that in places in

which agricultural labor (both male and female) is more productive, the value of chil-
dren is greater, which in turn means that the value of wives is greater. While it is
difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the two interpretations with my data, it may
not matter much, since in either case the same technological factors affect the shadow
price of wives.
36 At the same time, the productivity of male agricultural labor, which according to
my estimates is positively associated with the demand for wives, may have been increas-
ing. For example, the OLS estimates in table 4 indicate that a relative decline in land
devoted to yams increases male productivity, however, not by as much as it reduces
female productivity.
37 Male labor in CUte dIvoire, e.g., was traditionally a complement to female labor
in the production of yams, the favorite staple (Weekes-Vagliani 1985).
1 ,000 1 ,600
0 Cocoa Production
XCocoa Area Planted 1,400
800
1,200
c 600 - Cn ~~~~~~~~~~~~1,000 -
0 -
4_4 ~~~~~~~~~800 0
o 400 _-< 60
600
400
200~~~~~~~~~ - 0
200
(O C L 0 LO
0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0
Year
FIG. 1.-Cocoa production in C6te d'Ivoire (1960-88). Years refer to start of crop
years. Area planted was unavailable after 1984. Source: Republique de C6te d'Ivoire,
Statistiques agricoles (1981, 1984), and Food and Agriculture Organization, Production
Yearbook (various issues).
400 1,600
+Coffee Production
41 Coffee Area Planted - A 1,400
1,200
M ~~~~~~~~~~~1,000
A 200 s0 0 800
0
600 ~
1001, ~~~~~~~~~400
200
o LO 0 O 0 O cnP
(0 (0) N N' c
0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0)
Year
FIG. 2.-Coffee production in C6te d'Ivoire (1960-88). Years refer to start of crop
years. Area planted was unavailable after 1984. Source: Republique de C6te d'Ivoire,
Statistiques agricoles (1981, 1984), and Food and Agriculture Organization, Production
Yearbook (various issues).
3,000
X Yam Cassava X Maize +Rice
2,500 -
-2,000 -
1,500 -
1,000
5001 IIIU0 )0Ll 0
(0
Lo
co
Lo
-.
L oOr
r-00 00
co
00
0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0) 0)
Year
FIG. 3.-Major food crop production in C6te d'Ivoire (1960-88). Source: Re-
publique de C6te d'Ivoire, Statistiques agricoles (1971, 1978, 1984), and World Bank
(1992).
led to less polygyny.38 At the same time, Ivorian farmers were becom-
ing richer, which would have led to more polygyny, because of the
positive wealth effect in concert with an elastic aggregate supply of
wives (see n. 2), and perhaps also because of the greater inequality
of wealth accompanying agricultural development. Apparently the
shadow price effect outweighed these wealth effects. Alternative ex-
planations for the decline in polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire based on ex-
panded education and labor market opportunities for women are less
convincing: first, because few rural women have any schooling at all
and even fewer work off of their family farm, and second, because
urban polygyny, which is undoubtedly more susceptible to these
forces, has barely changed. It is also possible that the failure of Ivor-
ian polygyny to decline further in the decade preceding the 1988
census is connected to the upturn in food crop production after 1975
observed in figure 3.
There is no question that, for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the
introduction of cash crops has had an enormous economic and social
impact (Austen 1987), much more so than agricultural mechaniza-
tion. Boserup sees the plow as the key force in the transition from
polygyny to monogamy. In her view, population pressure eventually
38 Hecht (1984) observes that with the growth of cocoa and coffee in southern C6t
d'Ivoire came a shift toward migrant wage labor and sharecropping, and away from
marriage as a way of recruiting farm labor.
leads to agricultural intensification, the adoption of the plow, and,

consequently, a declining role for women in agriculture. My results,
while not inconsistent with Boserup's hypothesis, suggest that interna-
tional trade and the Western demand for such goods as coffee and
chocolate may be a far more important factor in the evolution of
African marriage patterns.
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The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa: Female Productivity and the Demand

for Wives in Cte d'Ivoire

Polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa,

[Polygyny] will, without question, eventually almost

[Journal of Political Economy, 1995, vol. 103, no. 5]

Polygyny, the taking of several wives, persists in sub-Saharan Africa

why polygyny is no longer as common in many parts of the world as

In this paper, I develop a structural approach to estimating the

II. The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan

market. Furthermore, individuals generally cannot increase their land allocations by

Saharan Africa. Overwhelmingly, African men control access to land,

example, Rosenzweig and Stark (1989) argue that exogamy in rural

III. Polygyny in Cote d'Ivoire: A Brief History

Has the structure of the African family been evolving inexorably

POLYGYNY IN C6TE DIVOIRE FROM CENSUS AND SURVEY DATA

YEAR AND DATA SOURCE p W m p W m p W m

1955 (Abidjan census) .15 2.2 1.18

Let us turn now to the historical picture. Despite explosive popula-

IV. A Life Cycle Model of a Farmer's Demand

Having now set the stage, in this section I construct a model of a

for example, Uw, > 0, excep

is fixed in the marriage market equilibrium. Finally, I assume that

fo e PtU [Cm(t), g(Lh(t)), WV(t)]dt, (1)

S(t) = H(v(t), L1(t), K(t); 0) - Cm(t) -(t)VW(t), (2)

S(t) = K(t) + pW(t), (3)

K(O) = K0, W(O) = 0, K(T) = KT, W(T) = WT. (4)

Equation (2) describes the accumulation of the husband's surplus,

UZg' = XILfI (5b)

UW = X(PHK + - HLf), (5c)

8(t) = rA (t) + H(v(t), Lf (t), K(t); 0) - Cm (t) -;(t)W(t) (2')

S(t) = A (t) + K(t) + pW(t), (3')

implying the revised optimality conditions

Uw = X(pr + r- HLf) (5c')

Availability of credit thus separates marriage decisions from farm

Wd = Wd(pr + +, v, 0, X). (6)

This demand function decomposes marital decisions at each point in

sign (dd sign(HIKjIILfK - HLfaHKK)- (7)

15 Specifically, I require that UZZ(g')2 + Uzg' + Uwzg' < 0. A sufficient condition

I close this section by examining the consequences of heterogeneity,

A. The COte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey

Between 1985 and 1988, a series of four high-quality nationwide

Although the CILSS ascertains the marital status of all household

B. Estimating the Agricultural Technology

Consider the conditional profit function

1it = V? (Lmit + 1)am(l) (Lfit + 1)aAxc)(K-t + 1)Pe~i+ti, (8

A major concern in estimating equation (8) in logarithmic form is

A/iT = otm (Xc)Almit + of(Xc) A lfit +A k+ Eiii t (9)

cK1(XC) = ajo + E aMkXck, j m,f.

Although ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of (9) are consistent

C. The Demand for Wives

To estimate the demand for wives, recall first that Cm = C - XW,

have X = Ucm(C - fW). Substituting for X in (6) and solving for W

Wid =OYo + _YL (XC) + Y2 m(Xc) + Y3m + Y4ln(Ci) + 5Ck + ui,

where Ck and u- represent, respectively, observed and unobserved

20 Without the separability assumption, X would be a function of 0 as well as C and

22 On the hypothesis that 3 > 0, note that variation in farmers' prod

shares in Xc sum to one), w

VI. Estimation of Agricultural Technology

A. Geographic Variation in Agricultural Technology

Though cocoa and coffee dominate the rural economy of Cote

DETERMINANTS OF CLUSTER-LEVEL MALE AND FEMALE LABOR INTENSITY

Regressor Mean (S.D.) Male Hours/Hectare Female Hours/Hectare

Constant ... 168.8 137.3

B. Variables and Sample for Profit Function