From Mother to Daughter: Does Equal Inheritance Property Laws Reform Improve Female Labor Supply and Educational Attainments in India?
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Rahul Suresh Sapkal
Abstract
In 2005, India witnessed a constitutional amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. It gave daughters equal inheritance rights as sons. However, five states in India had earlier amended the same Act in favor of daughters. Using this exogenous variation created by legislation of inheritance property rights, we exploit a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to estimate the impact of reform on female education, labor force participation and daughters’ educational attainment. The study finds that women who were exposed to the reform experience have greater average schooling years, and average months of employment. It is interesting to note that this positive effect is also observed for their daughters’ educational attainments. These finding are explained by improvement in their bargaining power in the household that further improves women’s autonomy in decision making. Results obtained from this study are consistent with the non-cooperative household bargaining models that which treats changes in inheritance laws as a positive shock to distribution factors which impact the intra-household bargaining. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank my thesis supervisor and mentor Prof. Hans-Bernd Schaefer for his consistent support and supervision. I gratefully acknowledge the extensive feedback provided by Prof. Stephan Voigt, Prof. Sripad Motiram, Prof. K R Shyam Sundar and Dr. Anne-Sophie Vandenberghe on an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to Prof. Robert Cooter and Dr. Massimiliano Vatiero for helpful comments and discussions at the International Conference on Law and Economics at Bilkent University (Turkey) and Annual Conference of Population Association of America, CA at 2015. Special thanks to anonymous reviewer for his/her insightful comments and suggestions. All potential errors in data interpretation or handling are the author’s responsibility.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Determining Values Using Options Contracts
- Rebalancing Competition Policy to Stimulate Innovation and Sustain Growth
- From Mother to Daughter: Does Equal Inheritance Property Laws Reform Improve Female Labor Supply and Educational Attainments in India?
- Jurisprudent Shift in China: A Functional Interpretation
Articles in the same Issue
- Determining Values Using Options Contracts
- Rebalancing Competition Policy to Stimulate Innovation and Sustain Growth
- From Mother to Daughter: Does Equal Inheritance Property Laws Reform Improve Female Labor Supply and Educational Attainments in India?
- Jurisprudent Shift in China: A Functional Interpretation
