daughters; the latter was not used to substitute away from the former. While the reforms did not necessarily close the gap between males and females in terms of intergenerational transfers, they did improve the overall socioeconomic status of women.<sup>13</sup> Yet, there are studies that illustrate the unintended consequences of amendments to inheritance law as well. For example, unlike Deininger et al. (2013), Roy (2015) finds that reforms to the 1956 HSA did not result in a higher likelihood that girls would inherit property. Instead, parents found a way to circumvent the law by “gifting” family property to sons, and compensating daughters for the disinheritance by providing a larger dowry or educational investments. While the increase in educational investments in daughters is encouraging, Roy’s (2015) study also indicates how differences in the treatment of boys and girls persisted despite legislative reform. The results of this analysis pertaining to inheritance are broadly supported by ethnographic work by Bates (2004),<sup>14</sup> and mixed methods work by Brown et al. (2002).<sup>15</sup> The disparity between Deininger et al.’s (2013) and Roy’s (2015) results can be explained by differences in the empirical strategy used. Roy’s (2015) empirical strategy is relatively similar to Deininger et al.’s (2013), however, she uses variation in the timing of death of the grandfather, not the timing of death of the father, to define treatment status. Citing Agarwal (1994), she argues that the initial amendments to the 1956 HSA relate to ancestral property owned by the grandfather. She uses 1999 REDS data for her analysis.

Rosenblaum’s (2015) study paints a starker picture of the unintended consequences of inheritance law reform in India. The purpose of his study was to estimate the causal impact of the legislative amendments in the four reform states on female child mortality. For this, he uses data on children born in 1975 or later from three rounds of the NFHS, and employs a difference-in-difference approach that exploits variation in reform status across states, the timing of reform in reform states, the religious affiliation of households in reform states, and the landownership status of households in reform states. He finds that the amendments to the HSA increased the likelihood of female child mortality by a small but significant amount (0.17 percentage points).<sup>16</sup> He argues that the provisions of the law made daughters more expensive to parents who preferred handing own property to sons, and thereby increased the incentive for parents to disinvest in their daughters’ health.

> 13 Evidence suggests that the inheritance law reform had positive impacts on women’s bargaining power within the household (Mookerjee 2017) and on women’s labor participation rates in high skilled jobs (Heath & Tan 2016). 14 Bates (2004) draws on intensive field research in Bheema, a village in the Pune district, in Maharashtra state. She finds that women in the village prefer to not assert their inheritance rights out of fear of disrupting their social networks. The author argues that since improvements in female education and employment have led to positive effects on other dimensions of gender equality in the village, the government would be well-advised to continue investing in education to encourage awareness of the benefits of women’s access to property rights.

> 15 Brown et al. (2002) conducted their study in selected blocks in rural Karnataka, India. They rely on information gathered from a 400-household survey, and in-depth interviews with women and key informants for their analysis. They find that daughters do not actively assert their property rights as they continue to believe that dowry is their share of family wealth. Many daughters are also unaware of the stipulations that protect them from disinheritance.

> 16 The likelihood of female child mortality increased by a slightly larger amount (0.32 percentage points) when the analysis sample was restricted to reform states.

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