surveys conducted in fiscal years 1994, 2000, and 2005. The services sector has only more recently been surveyed in fiscal years 2001 and 2006. In all cases, the survey was undertaken over two fiscal years (e.g., the 1994 survey was conducted during 1994-1995), but we will only refer to the initial year for simplicity. This section describes some key features of these data for our study, and we refer to readers to Ghani et al. (2011c) and its data appendix for greater details.For additional detail on the manufacturing survey data, we refer the reader to Nataraj (2009), Kathuria et al. (2010), and Hasan and Jandoc (2010). Dehejia and Panagariya (2010) provide a detailed overview of the services data and its important characteristics.

Our work considers portions of the Indian economy surveyed by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). This survey includes the essential questions on gender of the establishment owner that we describe shortly. Due to the nature of India’s data collection, the NSSO collects information on a representative sample of all services establishments and on a representative sample of the unorganized sector of manufacturing. Amanufacturing business is considered part of the unorganized sector if it has fewer than ten employees and uses electricity. If the establishment does not use electricity, the threshold is 20 workers. The unorganized sector accounts for over 99% of Indian manufacturing establishments.<sup>2</sup> For most of our estimations for the services sector, we mimic the unorganized nature of our manufacturing sample for comparability. We do this by classifying services establishments with fewer than five workers and/or those listed as an “own-account enterprise” (OAE) as the unorganized sector. OAE enterprises are firms that do not employ any hired worker on a regular basis. The choice of five employees as the size cutoff recognizes that average establishment size in services is significantly smaller than in manufacturing. Using this demarcation, the unorganized sector makes up approximately 75% of total employment in both manufacturing and services. We also show below that our results for the services sector are very similarif we use the full sample of services firms.

Establishments are surveyed by the NSSO with state and four-digit National Industry Classification (NIC) stratification. We use the provided sample weights to construct populationlevel estimates. Much of our analysis employs district-industry variation. Districts are administrative subdivisions of Indian states or territories that provide more meaningful local economic conditions. The male or female business ownership questions that we use are an outcome of the survey and not a factor in the stratification design.We have confirmed that our results hold at the state-industry level, for which the stratification was originally designed.

2Organized manufacturing establishments are not surveyed by the NSSO because they are instead surveyed by the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI). The ASI unfortunately does not collect the gender of the business owner. Ghani et al. (2011b) describe the organized and unorganized sectors in greater detail.

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