دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی اصلاحات حقوق زنان و ترجیحات فرزندان در هند - الزویر 2018

Abstract

We investigate whether legislation of equal inheritance rights for women modifies the historic preference for sons in India, and find that it exacerbates it. Children born after the reform in families with a firstborn daughter are 3.8-4.3 percentage points less likely to be girls, indicating that the reform encouraged female foeticide. We also find that the reform increased excess female infant mortality and son-biased fertility stopping. This suggests that the inheritance reform raised the costs of having daughters, consistent with which we document an increase in stated son preference in fertility post reform. We conclude that this is a case where legal reform was frustrated by persistence of cultural norms. We provide some suggestive evidence of slowly changing patrilocality norms.

5. Conclusion

This paper shows that legislation that gives women equal rights to inheritance of ancestral property intensifies son preference in fertility. The evidence is stark, showing large increases in parents’ proclivity to commit sex-selective abortion in order to manipulate the sex composition of their births in favour of sons. In fact, we find that parents also adjusted the sex composition of their births in other ways: the reform was associated with an increase in girl relative to boy infant mortality and an increase in the tendency for families without a son (or their desired number of sons) to continue fertility. This is corroborated by evidence on increased reported son preference (i.e. stated desired share of sons among births) post reform. Our findings demonstrate the challenges faced by legal reform. They suggest that support for institutionalizing women’s economic rights was not widespread in India. Pervasive support (among men) has been argued to emerge as the returns to human capital investment rise (Doepke and Tertilt 2009). While a full analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, we observe that average returns to human capital have been rising in India since the 1990s, and that women’s education has converged towards that of men. However, there remain barriers to women realizing returns to education on the labour market (Field et al. 2016). Moreover, we provide evidence that the convention that sons provide old-age security has not changed and there is no systematically provided state pension.