Empowering Women? Inheritance Rights, Female Education and Dowry Payments in India
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper examines the impact of women’s property inheritance rights on their educational attainment. Using exogenous variation created by femalefriendly state level reforms to the inheritance law in India, I find that educational attainment of women who were of primary school-going age at the time of reform increased by an average of 0.5 years in reforming relative to non-reforming states. The impact is present only for women in eligible (i.e. landowning and Hindu) households, with no concomitant impact on men. The underlying mechanism appears to be that despite gender-progressive legislation, parents continued to disinherit their daughters but compensated them either through higher investment in their education or higher dowries. JEL Codes: O12, K11, I21
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