Women's inheritance rights reforms and impact on women's empowerment: evidence from India

This paper explores the influence of inheritance rights on women' empowerment in India. We employ the quasi-natural experiment framework wherein; five states amended the Hindu Succession Act (HSA) from 1976 to 1994 before it was federally amended in 2005. Further, we apply difference-in-difference (DID) strategy and consider triangulation approach to identify women empowerment indicators namely: access to resources, agency, and outcomes to measure varying dimensions of empowerment. Using the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-I), our results indicate a positive impact on marriage choice, intimate partner violence, physical, and civil autonomy. However, negative impact on household autonomy and no significant on economic participation for women exposed to state amendments. Further, exploring the heterogeneities in terms of socio-economic status, location, level of patriarchy in a state, gender of the head of the household. Overall, the study highlights that the impact of inheritance law is not unfirm across different groups.