Access to Toilets and Violence Against Women

Kanika Mahajan and Sheetal Sekhri

No 44, Working Papers from Ashoka University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines if in-home access to toilets reduces the risk of violent crimes against women. We use the roll out of the Swachh Bharat Mission, a flagship toilet construction program in India, to ascertain if assault and rape of women reduce when women have access to in-home toilets relative to open defecation. We bolster our findings by using political alignment of locally elected representatives in close elections with the national government's political party, post the launch of the program, as an instrument in an instrumental variable strategy. Our IV estimation is robust to conditioning on average luminosity as a proxy for growth though we do not observe any correlation between our instrument and local economic growth measures in this time period. We find that construction of toilets reduces sexual assault of women, but we do not discern consistent changes in rape. Our findings are robust to a variety of controls, specifications, and identification approaches. We address reporting changes as a plausible alternative explanation.

Pages: 54
Date: 2020-11-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dp.ashoka.edu.in/ash/wpaper/paper44_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Access to toilets and violence against women (2022)
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:ash:wpaper:44

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Ashoka University, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ashoka University ().