Empowering women: Inheritance rights and female education in India 2010-2015

This paper examines the impact of women's property inheritance rights on their education. Using exogenous variation created by state level reforms to the inheritance law in India, I nd that mean educational attainment of women who were of primary school-going age at time of reform increased by 0.5 years in reforming relative to nonreforming states. The impact is present only for women in landowning and \" households, with no concomitant impact on men. I also provide suggestive evidence on the underlying mechanism that in order to prevent fragmentation of household property, parents compensate daughters by investing in their education.