Steven N.S.Cheung之婚姻合约文章简评

我忘了是转载哪个前辈的文章了。前辈简评了婚姻合约的主要观点。

Commentsby Guo, Rufei on

Cheung,Steven N.S., 1972, “The Enforcement of Property Rights in Children, and theMarriage Contract”, The Economic Journal, 82, pp. 641-657.

 

StevenCheung employed various concepts and theories of economics in analyzing themarriage contracts in ancient China. Steven states that children are kept asprivate property of parents (especially the head of a family). To guarantee theprivate property rights of parents on children, parents are granted exclusiverights in arranging marriage and deriving income from their children. Inaddition, an unregulated competitive market is observed from the fact thatmarriage brokers (mei ren) serve to collect information and facilitatenegotiation between the two contracting parties. Competitive bidding exists andhelps the formation of the market price of the bride.

 

Stevenargues that, by considering transaction costs, we are able to explain themarriage practices of the ancient China. Namely, the marriage practices mainlyserve to reduce the transaction costs of the marriage contract.

 

InCooter and Ulen’s text book, transaction cost of a contract is classified asthree types: searching cost, negotiation cost and enforcement cost. Theexistence of the marriage broker, as mentioned in the first paragraph, reducesthe searching and negotiation cost of the marriage contract significantly byspecialization. The enforcement cost involves the danger of running away of thebride, which is reduced by foot-binding.

 

Thenhere comes a question: why not sell the son and bind his feet? Steven arguesthat foot-binding can form a great disadvantage in the kind of work where amale had a comparative advantage, as farming. But it is not a great impedimentfor the ability of weaving and other domestic work carried out by female. As aresult, bind the daughter yields higher returns.

 

Tong-yang-xi,a present marriage contract for infants, is also analyzed. Why is it mainly thepoor who sold tong-yang-xi? The reason lies in the transaction cost of themoney market: the borrowing rate is higher than the lending rate, thus thepresent value of the grown daughter is lower for the poor who had to borrowmoney to raise the girl and use the borrowing rate as the discount rate. Thereis also a kind of future contract in the marriage market, namely “Pulp for themarriage”.

 

Thehierarchy within a family as a social custom also serves to reduce the cost ofdelineation and enforcement of property rights among family members. Ceremonialrites and the cult of ancestors repeatedly emphasized the ranking system insidea family and facilitate and distribution of rights within a family.

 

Inthe modern society, the vanishing of the unregulated competitive marriagemarket is accompanied by the alienation of Confucian ethics and complex kinshipterms. My roommate Sun Hang argues that the existence of marriage is mainly forthe raise of children. In my opinion, the extension of kinship by marriage isanother main benefit. Marriage means the combination of the resources of twofamilies. Since the risk of deceiving is lower for transactions between familymembers, marriage greatly expand the number of people who can be trusted andreduced the information cost of the family members of both sides. Given that marriageis an exchange of family background, the traditional requirement of marriagewithin the same social class is the natural requirement of equal exchange in atrade.