Intrahousehold Bargaining, Female Autonomy, and Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence from India
By Rachel Heath, Xu Tan. Journal of the European Economic Association, 2020
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply. We propose an alternative noncooperative household model in which a woman’s unearned income improves her autonomy within the household, which raises her gains from working and can increase her labor supply. We find empirical support for this model, using women’s exposure to the Hindu Succession Act in India as a source of exogenous variation in their unearned income. Exposure to the Hindu Succession Act increases a woman’s labor supply by between 3.8 and 6.1 percentage points, particularly into high-paying jobs. Autonomy increased by 0.17 standard deviations, suggesting that control of income is a potential channel for these effects. Thus, policies that empower women can have an additional impact on the labor market, which can further reinforce autonomy increases.
Subfields: Accounting, Gender Studies, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78f08c5eee361e542e4a38bacb4b04f5bc40dba1
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In Accounting
In Gender Studies
- Rohini Pande
- Rossella Calvi
- Timothy J. Besley
- Guido Tabellini
- V. Rao
- Ebonya L. Washington
- Tim Besley
- Esther Duflo
In Safety Research
Citations in the corpus
- Why Are Older Women Missing in India? The Age Profile of Bargaining Power and Poverty (2020, background): “, Roy (2008) and Heath and Tan (2014), who show that women’s exposure to the HSA reforms improves self-reported measures of autonomy and negotiating power within their marital families.”
- Women and Work in India: Descriptive Evidence and a Review of Potential Policies (2017, background): “The Nature of Employment in India’s Services Sector: Exploring the Heterogeneity. Neff, D., K. Sen, and V. Kling (2012). Puzzling decline in rural women’s labor force participation in India: A reexamination. Oaxaca, R. (1973). Male-female wage differentials in urban labor markets. International Econ”