Gender-neutral inheritance laws, family structure, and women's status in India

Sulagna Mookerjee

No 8017, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household, and investigates the mechanism, by exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women's inheritance rights in India. Results suggest that the reform increased women?s participation in decision-making but at the expense of the older generation of household members and not at the expense of their husbands. Two channels are proposed to explain this phenomenon. First, this can be driven by a shift in the family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear households. Such a change is consistent both with the increase in women's decision-making authority, which they can exert to move out of the joint household, as well as with men's incentives, since men have weaker financial links with their parents post-reform. Second, even within joint families, the amendments empowered young couples at the expense of the older generation of household members.

Keywords: Social Policy; Legal Products; Macroeconomic Management; Economic Forecasting; Legislation; Regulatory Regimes; Governance Diagnostic Capacity Building; Judicial System Reform; Legal Reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-30
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Gender-Neutral Inheritance Laws, Family Structure, and Women’s Status in India (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8017

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