Women's Inheritance Rights Reform and the Preference for Sons in India

Sonia Bhalotra, Rachel Brulé and Sanchari Roy
Additional contact information
Rachel Brulé: New York University, Abu Dhabi

No 11239, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate whether legislation of equal inheritance rights for women modifies the historic preference for sons in India, and find that it exacerbates it. Children born after the reform in families with a first-born daughter are 3.8–4.3 percentage points less likely to be girls, indicating that the reform encouraged female foeticide. We also find that the reform increased excess female infant mortality and son-biased fertility stopping. This suggests that the inheritance reform raised the costs of having daughters, consistent with which we document an increase in stated son preference in fertility post-reform. We conclude that this is a case where legal reform was frustrated by persistence of cultural norms. We provide some suggestive evidence of slowly changing patrilocality norms.

Keywords: son preference; ultrasound; inheritance rights; female foeticide; sex selection; gender; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 K11 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Journal of Development Economics, 2020, 146 (C), 102275

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11239.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Women's inheritance rights reform and the preference for sons in India (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11239

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().