Empowering women? Inheritance rights, female education and dowry payments in India

By Sanchari Roy. 2015

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the impact of gender-progressive reforms to the inheritance law in India on women's outcomes. Despite stipulating that daughters would have equal shares as sons in ancestral property, I find that the reform failed to increase the actual likelihood of women inheriting property. Instead, parents appear to be “gifting” their share of land to their sons in order to circumvent the law. However, parents also appear to be compensating their daughters for such disinheritance by giving them alternative transfers in the form of either higher dowries or more education following the reform.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9cc2545bf65e813940e73e8fbe3795c17b09fa3

Citations in the corpus

• Women's land rights as a pathway to poverty reduction: Framework and review of available evidence (2017, unknown): “Bargaining power and decision making on human capital investment and intergenerational transfers Roy (2015) India Analyze the impact of women’s property rights on alternative transfers including to education and dowries Quantitative, QE using natural experiment in timing of death relative to reform ”