New Paper on the expansion of Women's Inheritance Rights in India

Look at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locations=IN-BD-LK-NP-PK. India's female labor force participation rate (LFPR) is shockingly low, even when compared with similar South Asian countries. Moreover, unlike those other countries, India's female LFPR has been decreasing steadily since 2005. Why?

A recent paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102714; an ungated pre-publication version is available at https://aalims.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F04%2FBahrami-Rad-Duman-Female_inheritance.pdf) argues that India's anomalous trend in female LFPR may be the result of the expansion of women's inheritance rights in 2005. The paper, although by an economist, depends heavily on ideas from anthropology. In male dominated (or, patrilineal) societies, a family does not want its land to be lost, via inheritance, to the family a daughter marries into. So, women are married off to their male cousins. And to decrease the chances of a daughter marrying a non-cousin, the daughter is pressured to not venture outside the home, say, for work.

The author uses what economists call a difference-in-difference empirical strategy to reveal the causal chain. The 2005 law expanding women's inheritance rights was an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act and did not affect non-Hindus. So, one can look at the differences in, say, cousin marriage rates or female LFPR between Hindus and non-Hindus both before the 2005 law and after (hence, difference-in-difference). If one calculates the numerical value of Hindu cousin marriage rate minus non-Hindu cousin marriage rate and sees that it increased in a statistically significant way after 2005 one can make a causal claim. Same if the numerical value of Hindu female LFPR minus non-Hindu female LFPR, decreases after 2005.

The author says women have equal inheritance rights in Islam and many Islamic countries are male dominated, which explains why cousin-marriage rates are high and female labor force participation rates are low in Islamic societies.

Of course all this is not an argument against equal inheritance rights for men and women. It only means that if the government expands women's rights in an otherwise unequal and unchanged society, women might find that the loosening of one kind of pressure can lead to the tightening of other kinds of pressure.

Another point is that the liberalization of land markets might help in such situations. With well-functioning labor markets, land becomes like any other asset. A family could buy back the land inherited by a daughter who is marrying a non-cousin. That way, the family she is marrying into could buy equivalent land elsewhere and the family she is marrying out of could keep its land holdings intact.