Motivation: Governments support women's self-employment as a means to support women's empowerment. While they tend to do this by providing financial assistance, skills development and vocational training, they have not paid enough attention to entrepreneurship-related education in the school curriculum. The article addresses this research and policy gap. Purpose: While education may lead women to take up self-employment, anecdotal evidence also suggests that as women continue towards higher education, they tend to opt for wage employment. We investigate whether secondary school is the ideal time to encourage young women to take up self-employment. Approach and Methods: To test our hypothesis, we used two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) dataset as it contains granular information about education and self-employment at the individual level. We analysed data in univariate and multivariate settings. Findings: Our results indicate that while education is a key dimension for women's self-employment earnings, its effects peak at moderate levels of secondary education. We find that the increase in business income for each additional year of schooling between classes 9 and 12 (ages 15 to 18) is more than four times that from classes 1-8 and over twice that beyond class 12. We also find that social factors, such as marriage and infrastructure, have implications for the returns of education to women's income from running a business. Policy implications: To improve women's economic and social empowerment, policy-makers should encourage women to attain higher levels of education, since it is a significant predictor of entrepreneurial endeavours. Second, the 9-12 curriculum should focus on making girls and young women more aware of entrepreneurship and encourage them to take up self-employment.
The institutional change literature has predominantly focused on successful changes and sparsely on failed changes, but the idea of institutional fields reverting to their pre-change or near pre-change state, after change attempts, remains underexplored. Although recent studies have explored similar phenomenon from the perspective of actors resisting change and trying to restore status quo, a field-level understanding of the processes and the dynamics associated with it remains underexamined. The present study, using the case of reforms in the field of petroleum exploration and production in India, examines an institutional change where the institution, once modified, gradually reverted near to its prechange state. We suggest the concept of institutional elasticity to explain such reverting of institutions, and elaborate on three boundary conditions—scope of change, pace of change, and field-level actor constellations—which have implications for the relationship between institutional elasticity and reverting of institutions.
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