From Mother to Daughter: Does Equal Inheritance Property Laws Reform Improve Female Labor Supply and Educational Attainments in India?

Abstract In 2005, India witnessed a constitutional amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. It gave daughters equal inheritance rights as sons. However, five states in India had earlier amended the same Act in favor of daughters. Using this exogenous variation created by legislation of inheritance property rights, we exploit a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to estimate the impact of reform on female education, labor force participation and daughters’ educational attainment. The study finds that women who were exposed to the reform experience have greater average schooling years, and average months of employment. It is interesting to note that this positive effect is also observed for their daughters’ educational attainments. These finding are explained by improvement in their bargaining power in the household that further improves women’s autonomy in decision making. Results obtained from this study are consistent with the non-cooperative household bargaining models that which treats changes in inheritance laws as a positive shock to distribution factors which impact the intra-household bargaining. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.