with respect to inheritance, property ownership, marital regimes and protection from workplace discrimination. Countries with more gender egalitarian legal regimes generally have higher levels of property ownership by women. The relationship between the legislations and women’s property ownership holds across rural and urban areas and is much stronger for housing than land ownership. These results suggest that gender-equitable legislative reforms could be an important avenue to increase women’s property ownership.

This paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 discusses the importance of women’s ownership of immovable property and the pathways through which women typically acquire such ownership, focusing on the role of legal systems. Section 3 describes the DHS data and shows descriptive patterns of gender gaps in property ownership across and within countries. Section 4 uses multivariate regression techniques to explore how laws with respect to inheritance, property ownership, marital regimes and protection from workplace discrimination are associated with women’s ownership of land and housing in developing countries. Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Women and Property**

# **2.1The importance of women’s property ownership**

There is significant evidence that women’s rights to property and other assets are associated with improved well-being and agency. Many models of household behavior, such as cooperative bargaining models proposed by Manser and Brown (1980) and McElroy and Horney (1981), predict that bargaining power within the marriage depends on the husband’s and wife’s ‘outside options’, e.g. their expected utility if the union were to end. These outside options depend, among other factors, on who in the family owns the household’s property, and the rules and norms that shape the division of assets and other family resources upon divorce (Lundberg and Pollak 1996; Lundberg et al 1997; Fafchamps and Quisumbing 2005). Empirical studies suggest that a more egalitarian distribution of assets between husband and wife, or the wife’s property ownership directly, correlate with the wife’s participation in intrahousehold decision making (e.g. Beegle et al 2001 for Indonesia; Oduro et al 2012 for Ghana; Swaminathan et al 2012 for India; Mishra and Sam 2016 for Nepal; Behrman 2017 for Malawi); decision-making being considered an indicator of agency (Kabeer 1999). Property ownership or wealth can also offer protection from intimate partner violence for women (Panda and Agarwal 2005; Oduro et al 2015). Studies from India show that legislative changes under the Hindu Succession Act, which strengthened women’s inheritance rights, positively impacted measures of female empowerment (i.e. education and health outcomes). These effects were even larger for the ‘second generation’, i.e. daughters born to women themselves affected by the reforms (Deininger et al 2013, 2018; Roy 2015).

In addition to positively impacting women’s own well-being and agency, property ownership can have implications for children’s outcomes. As discussed in World Bank (2011), many studies find that an increase in women’s control over the household’s resources leads to increased spending on food (e.g. Duflo and Udry 2004 for Côte d’Ivoire; Doss 2005 for Ghana), greater investment in health, education and children’s goods (e.g. Thomas 1997 for Brazil; Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000 for Bangladesh) and improvements in development outcomes and well-being 3