Women's inheritance rights reform and the preference for sons in India

Sonia Bhalotra, Rachel Brulé and Sanchari Roy

Journal of Development Economics, 2020, vol. 146, issue C

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 firstborn 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: Inheritance rights; Ultrasound; Female foeticide; Sex-selection; Son preference; Gender; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 K11 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387818300294
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Women's Inheritance Rights Reform and the Preference for Sons in India (2017)
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:eee:deveco:v:146:y:2020:i:c:s0304387818300294

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.08.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().