Intergenerational Effects of Improving Women's Property Rights: Evidence from India

Nayana Bose () and Shreyasee Das
Additional contact information
Nayana Bose: Department of Economics, Scripps College, Claremont

Working Papers from UW-Whitewater, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper analyzes the intergenerational effects following the positive changes in women’s inheritance rights. The amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, the law governing inheritance for Hindus, empowered unmarried daughters at the time of the reform to have equal rights to inherit ancestral property as their brothers. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy and exploit the state level variation in a woman’s exposure to the reform. Using the Indian Human Development Survey data for rural India, we find that the property rights reform significantly increased women’s education. We find a significant decrease in her sons’ education, the effect is magnified in households where fathers are less educated than mothers. We further explore the role of birth order and the gender composition of children to assess the intergenerational impact of this more gender equal inheritance law. Regardless of the child’s gender, our results show a significant decrease in educational attainment for younger children.

Keywords: Property Rights; Hindu Inheritance Law; Education; Intergenerational Transfers; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I25 J16 K36 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-11, Revised 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-gen, nep-hme and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uww.edu/documents/colleges/cobe/economics/wpapers/17-01_Bose_Das.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.uww.edu/documents/colleges/cobe/economics/wpapers/17-01_Bose_Das.pdf [302 Found : Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.uww.edu/documents/colleges/cobe/economics/wpapers/17-01_Bose_Das.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Intergenerational effects of improving women’s property rights: evidence from India (2021)
Working Paper: Intergenerational Effects of Improving Women's Property Rights: Evidence from 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:uww:wpaper:17-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from UW-Whitewater, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Yamin Ahmad ().