Customary Norms, Inheritance, and Human Capital: Evidence from a Reform of the Matrilineal System in Ghana∗

This paper explores the effects of different descent rules on human capital accumulation. In a context where parents are constrained in the possibility of passing land on to their children (e.g., because it is considered property of the extended family, or clan), investment in their children’s human capital might not be optimal. We focus on matrilineal inheritance rules and exploit a policy experiment in Ghana, the introduction of the 1985 Intestate Succession Law. The Law introduced minimum quotas for the land that fathers can devolve on their children through intestacy, substantially reducing the share going to the matriclan. In our setting, the Law allowed parents to move closer to the unconstrained optimum. We find evidence that, compared to the other patrilineal ethnic groups in Ghana (unaffected by the Law), children in matrilineal groups exposed to the reform received significantly less education. This effect is specific to males for whom the matrilineal constraint was binding, while there is no effect for females. This evidence suggests that before the reform matrilineal groups in Ghana invested more in their children’s education to substitute for land inheritance and more generally that traditional norms are important in determining the intergenerational accumulation of property and human capital investments. ∗We are grateful to Silvia Redaelli for extremely valuable inputs in the early stages of this project. We thank Maristella Botticini, Denis Cogneau, Sylvie Lambert, Matthias Messner, Christopher Udry, Gordon Woodman, and seminar participants at Bocconi University, CSAE Conference in Oxford, Paris School of Economics, CIFAR, IMT Lucca, UCL, EBRD, and Carlos III for helpful comments. We are indebted to the Ghana Statistical Service for making the data available. This paper is produced as part of the project “Actors, Markets, and Institutions in Developing Countries: A micro-empirical approach” (AMID), a Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Programme Contract Number 214705 PITN-GA-2008-214705.