among children (e.g. Thomas 1990 for Brazil; Allendorf 2007 for Nepal; Qian 2008 for China; Luke and Munshi 2011 for India; Menon et al 2014 for Vietnam).<sup>1</sup> Finally, lack of ownership of land and other productive assets by women can lead to inefficiencies. Goldstein and Udry (2008) show that Ghanaian women underinvest in soil fertility due to tenure insecurity, which causes a loss of output for the household as a whole. Dillon and Voena (2017) find that, in communities with weak inheritance rights for widows, concerns over eviction deter land investments even among currently married women. These microeconomic inefficiencies may be exacerbated if gender gaps in the ownership of land and other immovable property, due to their dual function as collateral, reinforce gender gaps in access to credit and other productive inputs (World Bank 2011).

# **2.2 Women’s pathways to property ownership**

This section discusses several pathways through which women obtain ownership of land and housing property, and the constraints they encounter relative to men. We focus on life events, particularly marriage and inheritance, which, in most developing countries, are the principal channels for both women and men to acquire property. For example, the Gender Asset Gap project shows that most agricultural parcels are inherited in Ecuador (53 percent), Ghana (59 percent) and Karnataka, India (86 percent). Similarly, between 34 percent (Karnataka) and 45 percent (Ghana) of all housing lots and between 8 percent (Ecuador) and 57 percent (Karnataka) of principal residences are received as inheritances. Besides life events, the section also discusses, although in – less detail, other channels through which individuals obtain property principally purchases. Within each pathway, gender gaps can emerge from an interaction between households, markets and social norms or institutions (World Bank 2011).

We begin with the first pathway, marriage, by reviewing how basic institutional rights to property ownership sometimes change for women upon marriage. According to the 2020 Women, Business and the Law (WBL) database, married women face legal restrictions on property ownership in 19 out of 190 countries for which data are available. While property rights of unmarried women are no longer included as a separate indicator in the 2020 WBL, earlier versions of the data showed that unmarried women typically have the same rights as unmarried men (Gaddis et al 2018). This demonstrates that, from a legal perspective, discriminatory provisions often do not apply to all women but to married women specifically, whose legal status changes, sometimes profoundly, upon marriage (Hallward-Driemeier and Hasan 2013).

Today’s property rights of women in marriage often have historical roots. British common law was particularly unfavorable to women, owing to the doctrine of ‘couverture’, whereby a woman’s legal status was subsumed by her husband upon marriage. Roman and Islamic legal traditions generally allowed married women to retain their legal personality (Deere and Doss 2006). Nowadays, women’s and men’s ability to own property during marriage and after its dissolution is governed by marital property regimes and other laws specifying how nonmonetary contributions – to the marriage for example, childcare or other unpaid domestic work from a stay-at-home spouse – are taken into consideration for the distribution of property between spouses. The most common

> 1 Some studies do not support this notion. Akresh et al (2016) find that (conditional) cash transfers given to women in rural Burkina Faso improve routine health checkups of children by a similar magnitude as transfers given to men.

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