Dear Colleagues,
The next Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy Research virtual seminar is May 10, from 11:00-12:15 ET. Simon Parker (Ivey Business School) will present "Women empowerment and female entrepreneurship: Evidence from a natural experiment in India" (with Danny Chung). Jorge Guzman (Columbia U.) will discuss. Click HERE to register. Abstract is below. We hope you join us.
See our seminar schedule HERE.
Tim Folta (UCONN) & Maryann Feldman (ASU)
Abstract: Do institutional changes designed to enhance women's inheritance and property rights stimulate women entrepreneurship? Using a natural experiment in the form of selective legislative changes to Indian inheritance laws, we explore the impacts on self-employment propensities among Indian women. We estimate large positive impacts of the reform. Independent evidence (Roy, 2015) suggests that treated women did not actually realize greater inheritances in practice, benefiting instead from parental transfers of human and financial capital. We therefore sort through various competing mechanisms that can explain our results. We find that the most convincing explanation is that the reforms increased women's bargaining power in the household, enabling them to substitute away from domestic duties and towards market work, especially self-employment.