Customary Norms, Inheritance, and Human Capital: Evidence from a Reform of the Matrilineal System in Ghana
By Eliana La Ferrara, A. Milazzo. 2014
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The authors study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. The authors exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups can inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform received 0.9 less years of education - an effect driven by landed households, for whom the reform was binding. The authors find no effect for girls, whose inheritance was de facto unaffected. These patterns suggest that before the reform matrilineal groups invested more in education than they will if unconstrained, to substitute for land inheritance, underscoring the importance of cultural norms.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77c34874c5a1534955f0aa03a59c6990cd1e250a
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Citations in the corpus
- Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments (2020, background): “Mbaye and Wagner (2013) collect data in Senegal and find that married women live an average of 20 kilometers from their natal home. Unfortunately, information on the distance from natal home to the current location is not available in the DHS. In India, marriage migration is more common: 58.02% of w”
- Bride Price and Female Education (2020, unknown): “…like patrilocal residence, inheritance, son preference, and polygyny have been shown to play an important role in human capital investments ( Jacoby 1995; Levine and Kevane 2003; Tertilt 2005, 2006; Gaspart and Platteau 2010; La Ferrara and Milazzo 2011; Bau 2019; Jayachandran and Pande 2017).”
- Culture and Institutions (2015, unknown): “For more on the relationship between kinship groups and economic outcomes, see La Ferrara and Milazzo (2011) on how kinship differences in inheritance rules can affect economic outcomes; Fafchamps (2000) and Fisman (2003) on how belonging to the same clan affects access to credit; and Luke and…”
- Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices (2021, background): “…on the importance of culture for determining the effects of different policies (Ashraf et al., forthcoming; World Bank, 2015; Ebenstein, 2014; La Ferrara and Milazzo, 2017, Schoellman and Tertilt, 2006; Tertilt, 2005), as well as the growing literature that examines the effects of…”