-the coparcenary- that comprises only males severely limits females’ ability to inherit joint property.<sup>2</sup> To eliminate the gender inequality inherent in this practice, a number of states amended this Act by passing substantively similar amendments -refereed as Hindu Succession Act Amendments or HSAA- starting from 1987. This stipulated that coparceners’ daughters will acquire coparcenary rights by birth,<sup>3</sup> thereby making their status equal to that of sons. While the HSAA was adopted at a national level in 2005, the fact that early amendments were adopted only by a select set of states and that in 2011 when our survey was conducted children in non-reform states were still too young to have benefited from the HSAA in any meaningful way thus allows us to explore whether changes in inheritance legislation improved access to physical and human capital by women who were the intended beneficiaries from such legislation.

A number of studies indeed explored first-generation effects of the HSAA. Comparing males and females in the same household for those that did and did not benefit from the reform suggests that the HSAA markedly increased the likelihood of inheriting land for direct beneficiaries (Deininger _et al._ 2013). Use of repeated cross sections suggests that the reforms may have given rise to compensatory behavior in the sense that they increased educational attainment but reduced the likelihood of girls inheriting land (Roy 2013).<sup>4</sup> Yet, the finding that, for landowning households, inheritance reform reduced girls’ survival ratios, possibly by making it more relatively costly to raise girls vs. boys (Rosenblum 2012) points towards potential unintended second-generation effects. While slow changes in social norms may be one reason for this, this suggests that second-generation effects deserve more in-depth analysis.

# **2.3 Data, sample composition, and descriptive statistics**

To analyze effects of inheritance reform, we use data from a 2011 follow up to the 2007 Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) conducted by India’s National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa. The Household survey collected information on three generations, the head and spouse at the time of the survey (generation II), their parents (generation I), and their children (generation III). The total sample comprises 1,209 households with 3,193 generation III descendants. Figure 1 plots the density distribution of birth years for the sample, pointing towards an average age of 79, 49, and 19 years for individuals in generations I, II, and III, when data were collected.

Beyond the information routinely collected in multi-purpose household surveys (e.g., year of birth and years of schooling), our survey includes data on time use during a typical day for all individuals in generations II and III. For those in generation II, we have information on the value of all assets (including

> 2 Our focus on intestate inheritance is justified by the fact that rural Indians lack both the knowledge and the resources to have a will registered. 3 The Act was amended in 1986 in Andhra Pradesh in 1989 in Tamil Nadu, and in 1994 in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Kerala had abolished the joint family property system in 1976 (Agarwal 1994).

> 4 Education results may partly be due to potential state- and gender-specific trends independent of the inheritance reform an results on inheritance and dowry may be driven by the fact that at the time when data were collected girls in the sample exposed to the reform were still relatively young (15 years in KA and MA; 20 years in TN, 23 years in AP, and 33 years in KE) when data were collected in 1999 and that women who had inherited land may no longer live with their parents.

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