Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
August 18, 2018
Summary:
We investigate whether legislation of equal inheritance rights for women modifies the historic preference for sons in India, and find that it exacerbates it. Children born after the reform in families with a firstborn daughter are 3.8–4.3 percentage points less likely to be girls, indicating that the reform encouraged female foeticide. We also find that the reform increased excess female infant mortality and son-biased fertility stopping. This suggests that the inheritance reform raised the costs of having daughters, consistent with which we document an increase in stated son preference in fertility post reform. We conclude that this is a case where legal reform was frustrated by persistence of cultural norms. We provide some suggestive evidence of slowly changing patrilocality norms.
Published in
Journal of Development Economics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.08.001
ISSN
3043878
Subjects
Links
- http://repository.essex.ac.uk/22951/
- http://repository.essex.ac.uk/22951/
- https://lib.essex.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1615959?lang=eng
Notes
Online Early
#525681