@article{df5cf2cbca3e491da777ab403597e322,
title = "Women's inheritance rights reform and the preference for sons in India",
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.",
keywords = "Female foeticide, Gender, India, Inheritance rights, Sex-selection, Son preference, Ultrasound",
author = "Sonia Bhalotra and Rachel Brul{\'e} and Sanchari Roy",
note = "Funding Information: We thank the editor, Andrew Foster, and an anonymous referee for detailed and helpful comments. This paper was presented at a conference on Early Childhood Development in India September 15?16, 2017, sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania as part of its 25th year celebration and organized by Jere Behrman, Michel Guillot, Devesh Kapur (CASI Director) and Prakarsh Singh. We are grateful to Farzana Afridi, Jere Behrman and Prakarsh Singh for their detailed feedback and suggestions, and to the conference participants for helpful discussions. We would also like to thank seminar participants at the Barcelona Summer Forum 2018, CAGE-Warwick, CMPO-Bristol, King's Business School, Strathclyde Business School, Sussex, UNU-WIDER for their comments. Brule would like to thank Andrew Foster for kindly providing access to the REDS 2006 dataset. Bhalotra would like to acknowledge partial funding from ESRC Grant ES/L009153/1 awarded to the Research Centre for Micro-Social Change at ISER, University of Essex. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Elsevier B.V.",
year = "2020",
month = sep,
doi = "10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.08.001",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "146",
journal = "Journal of Development of Economics",
issn = "0304-3878",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}