Author: Sulagna Mookerjee

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13:

"This dissertation contributes to the literature on women's empowerment and household structure in South Asia. The first chapter examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household. I exploit variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women's inheritance rights in India. For generations, inheritance laws in India favored men, but in recent years five states amended their inheritance laws to make them gender-neutral. I exploit the spatial and time variation in the implementation of the amendments to identify their effect on women's outcomes. I find that the amendments increased women's participation in household decision-making as well as their freedom of movement. The reform applied only to women belonging to certain religions, allowing me to perform falsification tests to support my identification strategy. In the second chapter, I build on these results, and explore the mechanisms through which the reform affects women's outcomes. Previous literature has almost exclusively conceptualized decision-making within the family as a spousal process, and therefore interpreted the finding of higher autonomy of women as evidence of increased bargaining power relative to their husbands. Interestingly, I find that the increase in women's decision-making authority appears to be not at the expense of their husbands, but rather at the expense of the members of the extended family, such as the husbands' parents. I propose two channels to explain this phenomenon. First, I show that this can be explained by a shift in the family structure in the reform states, from traditional joint families to nuclear households. Such a change in family structure is consistent with the effect of the reform on men's incentives, since men have weaker financial links with their parents post-reform. Second, even within joint families, the amendments empowered young couples at the expense of the older generation of household members. Overall, though the reform was intended as a transfer from men to women, I show that it in fact resulted in an intergenerational transfer of decision-making authority within the household. In the third chapter (co-authored with Umair Khalil), we specifically investigate the effect of patrilocality (also known as the joint family system), the system of post-marital residence where a married couple resides with the husband's family, on women's welfare. Using data from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, our results indicate that married women in patrilocal or joint households are less likely to participate in economic and healthcare decisions, have limited freedom of movement but face less domestic abuse. A comparison of outcomes for daughters of the household heads with those of the daughters-in-law shows that the effect stems from discrimination against women married into the family. Moreover, consistent with anecdotal and anthropological evidence, we find that the negative effect of patrilocality shrinks over the tenure of marriage. Various robustness checks and identification strategies show that the results are not driven by self-selection into type of post-marital residence."--Abstract.