It may still be that untreated districts in our sample are not representative of statewide trends and that women in these districts may be more or less empowered than average, implying that program placement may be targeted. However, the nationally-representative NFHS-3 (International Institute for Population Studies and Macro International, 2007) and DLHS-3 (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and International Institute for Population Studies, 2010) show that the women in untreated districts in our sample do not differ significantly from the rest of the state. For instance, the average age at at marriage for Uttarkhandi women is 20.6, while in our untreated sample, it is 19.8; 43 percent of all Uttarkhandi women work while 45 percent of the untreated women in our sample do. The total fertility rate in the state is 2.6, which corresponds closely to the average family size of one boy and one girl in our untreated sample. Finally, while 84 percent of the state has access to electricity, 90 percent of our untreated sample does. This lack of significant differences suggests that the program is not targeted at districts by levels of female empowerment.

The next concern with identifying the effect of the program is self-selection. Table 5 indicates the presence of self-selection into _Mahila Samakhya_ . The average participant is three percentage points closer in age to her husband than the average non-participant in treated districts, which suggests that women with greater initial bargaining power may self-select into the program. Further, participants tend to have older and more sons than non-participants, although the differences are not significantly different from zero. Participants are significantly more likely to be Brahmin than non-participants. Participants are less likely to live with their husbands; the difference of 19 percent is highly significant. However, in our pre-tests, we found that even women who do not live with their husbands live with other male relatives, including fathers, fathers- or brothers-in law, uncles, and sons. In all our fieldwork, we only encountered seventeen women who lived alone or without any older male relative. Of these seventeen women, all but six lived with their mothers- or sisters-in-law. The presence of these relatives in the house represents restrictions on the woman’s empowerment, even if she lives without her husband.

Several other characteristics, such as the number and age of daughters, the spousal education ratio, and the woman’s time to collect water, are not statistically different for participants and nonparticipants. Further, none of the wealth indicators, including number of rooms, electrification, improved toilet facilities, materials used in floor and wall construction, are different for these two groups, suggesting that poorer participants neither select into the program nor are they targeted based on indicators of wealth (number of rooms, electrification, access to improved toilet facilities, and nature of the construction materials used for the floor and walls of the house). Nonetheless, this table highlights the importance of controlling for selection in to the _Mahila Samakhya_ program. In addition to the variables listed above in the Survey Description, we also control for the imbalanced characteristics discussed here.

# **6 Empirical Analysis**

## **6.1 Methodology**

We use several methods to identify the effect of the program in the presence of self-selection. We first match women by their pre-existing bargaining outcomes and other characteristics across treated and untreated districts. We then control for potential issues of truncation in the matching. Next, we use an instrumental variables approach, where our instrument is the interaction between the time the program has been in the village and the years over 16 of the woman to capture the exposure of the woman to the program. We separately control for the age of the woman in both first and 14