This paper examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household, and investigates the mechanism, by exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women’s inheritance rights in India. Results suggest that the reform increased women’s participation in decision-making but at the expense of the older generation of household members and not at the expense of their husbands. Two channels are proposed to explain this phenomenon. First, this can be driven by a shift in the family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear households. Such a change is consistent both with the increase in women’s decision-making authority, which they can exert to move out of the joint household, as well as with 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.
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Using the unique staggered nature of the Indian General Elections, where voting takes place in several different phases spanning several weeks, we investigate how spatial variation in electoral dynamics affects subsequent voter turnout. Exploiting quasirandom assignment of constituencies to electoral phases each election, we assess the impact of average voter turnout in a given phase, on turnout in the subsequent phase. Standard endogeneity concerns in the estimation of social interactions are dealt by employing two distinct instrumental variables: 1) constituency specific average historical turnout in elections from the pre-staggered era, 2) voter density as measured by number of voters per polling location in a given constituency. Our estimates from both IVs, show that a 1 percentage point (pp) increase in turnout in a given phase depresses turnout in the subsequent phase by 0.3-0.5 pp. Crucially, falsification tests examining the effect on turnout in the current phase, of constituencies in the same phase or in future phases in the same election, produce no such effect. We find the data broadly support an ethical voter model, in which each agent acts as if setting an example for all and seek to maximize social welfare.
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