Gender-Neutral Inheritance L;aws, Family Structure, and Women's Status in India
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 Indi...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/571781490880608807/Gender-neutral-inheritance-laws-family-structure-and-womens-status-in-India http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26358 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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