(these measures are typically considered good policy choices irrespective of their impact on son preference). Indirect measures also include advocacy efforts.

# **_4.1 Legislative Reform to Promote Women’s Rights_**

Several markers of gender inequality and patriarchal systems are codified in legislation, and in economic and political practices. These markers can be selected for intervention to improve women’s position in the economic, social, and political sphere, and to allow parents to see girls as worth investing in.

Section A4 in the Appendix outlines some of the legal measures to promote women’s rights in China, India, and Korea. Note that this list is not exhaustive.

# _Inheritance laws and property rights_

One area of possible intervention is in inheritance laws and property rights. In patrilineal societies, where property is transferred to the next generation only through the male line, married women prefer bearing sons instead of daughters. One of the reasons for this is that sons can inherit family property, and are therefore better positioned to provide financial support during old age (DasGupta et al. 2003). The importance of sons as a means to hold onto family property, and ensure support during old-age, is particularly emphasized in the case of widowhood as women would not inherit their deceased husband’s property. While this is not the only reason for women’s preference for male children, it can be argued that amendments to inheritance laws can make some progress in changing the valuation of daughters compared to sons.<sup>11</sup> Deininger et al. (2013) use state-level reforms to the 1956 Hindu Succession Act (HSA) in India to illustrate this (see section A4, Appendix). The 1956 Act practically guaranteed that ancestral property in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh families would be bequeathed only by male family members. However, reforms initiated in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Karnataka ensured that sons and daughters would have equal rights to ancestral property. To estimate the causal impact of these reforms on intergenerational transfers in the four reform states, Deininger et al. (2013) draw on data from the 2006 Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS), and use a difference-in-difference approach to compare the inheritance of land by males and females in the same household from fathers who died before and after the reforms were passed.<sup>12</sup> The evaluation results suggest that following the reforms, daughters were more likely to inherit family property, and parents increased investments in daughters’ schooling. What is noteworthy here is that parents increased both physical capital and human capital transfers to

> 11 There is evidence (see Bhalotra et al. (2016)) to suggest that inheritable land rights increases the motivation to exercise son preference in contexts where the tradition is for sons to inherit land. Following from this, it could be argued that if land rights could be passed on to male _and_ female children, then the incentive to exercise son preference would diminish.

> 12 These comparisons were augmented by looking at differences across Hindu families and non-Hindu families in reform states, and differences across reform states and non-reform states.

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