Legal Origins and Female HIV∗

More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In Sub-Saharan Africa common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the ‘feminization of AIDS’) explaining much of its prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa. ∗Contact e-mail: [email protected]. This paper has greatly benefited from comments of the editor and four anonymous referees. As well as discussions with Patrick Francois, Francesco Trebbi, and Matilde Bombardini, and comments from seminar participants at NYU, UCLA, UCSD, CIFAR (IOG Group), University of Bristol, Monash University, CWEN, UNU-WIDER, Georgetown University, University of Washington, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, and the World Bank. I am very grateful to Rogerio Santarrosa for exceptional research assistance. This paper was partly written while I was visiting Aix-Marseille School of Economics and I thank them for their hospitality.