metadata: authors: 0: author: Hauser,Christina Sarah
count: Tunisia
docna: 0: docna: Tackling Gender Discriminatory Inheritance
            Law Privately : Lessons from a Survey Experiment in Tunisia
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
abstracts: cdata!: When reform of gender discriminatory law
            fails, individual action can offer a second-best solution.
            As most Muslim-majority countries, Tunisia applies Islamic
            inheritance law, systematically favoring sons over
            daughters. By making gifts to their daughter, parents can
            privately attenuate gender discrimination in inheritance.
            This study investigates to what extent gifting can represent
            an alternative to legal reform and for whom. Within a
            randomized experiment, this study tests whether providing
            information on public support for inheritance law reform
            and/or the possibility to make a gift to one&#x2019;s
            daughter has a causal impact on individual attitudes towards
            women&#x2019;s right to inheritance. The overall
            evidence on the effectiveness of the proposed informational
            treatments to encourage gifting is mixed. However, approval
            of gifting daughters is high&#x2014;especially among the
            wealthy. Men are more likely to gift than women. By
            contrast, demand for legal reform is significantly higher
            among women and individuals with low educational attainment.
            The findings thus suggest that gifting indeed represents an
            alternative to legal reform; but mostly for a relatively
            well-off subset of the population, leaving the agency to the
            traditionally male head of the family.
display_title: Tackling Gender Discriminatory
            Inheritance Law Privately : Lessons from a Survey Experiment
            in Tunisia
listing_relative_url: /research/2024/02/34252495/tackling-gender-discriminatory-inheritance-law-privately-lessons-survey-experiment-tunisia
topicv3: Political Economy of Reform m1326263 836,Islamic Law m1326357 2070,Gender and Economic Empowerment m1327622 911
publishtoextweb_dt: 2024-02-05T00:00:00Z
dois: 10.1596/41010
no_of_pages: 66
author_keys: 0: author_key: 2205624
model_extractions: Policy Research Working Paper 10693 Tackling Gender Discriminatory Inheritance Law Privately Lessons from a Survey Experiment in Tunisia _Christina Sarah Hauser_ Middle East and North Africa Region Office of the Chief Economist February 2024
Policy Research Working Paper 10693

# **Abstract**

When reform of gender discriminatory law fails, individual action can offer a second-best solution. As most Muslim-majority countries, Tunisia applies Islamic inheritance law, systematically favoring sons over daughters. By making gifts to their daughter, parents can privately attenuate gender discrimination in inheritance. This study investigates to what extent gifting can represent an alternative to legal reform and for whom. Within a randomized experiment, this study tests whether providing information on public support for inheritance law reform and/or the possibility to make a gift to one’s daughter has a causal impact on individual attitudes towards women’s right to inheritance. The overall evidence on the effectiveness of the proposed informational treatments to encourage gifting is mixed. However, approval of gifting daughters is high—especially among the wealthy. Men are more likely to gift than women. By contrast, demand for legal reform is significantly higher among women and individuals with low educational attainment. The findings thus suggest that gifting indeed represents an alternative to legal reform; but mostly for a relatively well-off subset of the population, leaving the agency to the traditionally male head of the family.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The author may be contacted at christina.hauser@eui.eu or christina.sarah.hauser@gmail.com.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
Tackling Gender Discriminatory Inheritance Law Privately: Lessons from a Survey Experiment in Tunisia Christina Sarah Hauser<sup>∗</sup> JEL classification: J16, N37, D31, K37 Keywords: gender discrimination, inheritance, Islamic law, information experiment

> ∗Department of Economics, European University Institute (EUI), Via delle Fontanelle 18, 50014 Fiesole, Italy. Email: christina.hauser@eui.eu. I gratefully acknowledge the financial and analytical support from the Office of the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MNACE; TTLs: Nelly Elmallakh and Nazmul Chaudhury) under the regional Labor and Gender Research Programs of the World Bank. This research also benefited from a LEAP (Laboratory for Effective Anti-Policy Action) Student Grant and an Early Stage Research Grant of the European University Institute. IRB approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the European University Institute in December 2022. The study was preregistered at the AEA RCT registry on 9 January 2023 (AEARCTR-0010343). I am indebted to One-to-One for Research and Polling for superb data collection and to Friedrich Ebert Stiftung for hosting me during my research stay in Tunis. I wish to thank Jihen Abbes, Sule Alan, Haroun Ben Youssef, Tom Crossley, Souleima Dhaya, Leyla Hassen, Zeineb Mazouz, Youssef Meddeb, Imen Mezlini, Dietlind Stolle, Alessandro Tarozzi, Abir Tayari and Weiwei Zheng for helpful comments and advice. Any mistakes are my own.
# **1 Introduction**

There is a large consensus in the literature that female empowerment improves women’s and children’s outcomes and plays a positive role in economic development overall (e.g. Duflo, 2003 and Allendorf, 2007). Women living in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region score lowest worldwide on most measures of economic empowerment, including access to property ownership (World Economic Forum, 2023). In the region, inheritance has historically been the primary way through which women access property and it plays a decisive role in allowing women to participate in the economy, e.g. by enabling them to start their own businesses (IFC, 2017). Property ownership can insure women against unforeseen misfortunes and increase their bargaining power within the household. However, most MENA countries apply Islamic inheritance law, which systematically favors sons over daughters. The bequest foreseen for an individual’s children is split unevenly by gender: a son always receives twice the share of a daughter. This arrangement is commonly justified with a man’s obligation to take care of his wife, daughter or sister. Social reality in the MENA region, however, is changing. In Tunisia, women represent more than half of the college student population (World Bank, 2022b) and marry increasingly late or not at all (Assaad et al., 2017). The “gender gap” in education has reversed: in the most recent panel survey, 71 percent of Tunisian women were as educated as or even more highly educated than their husbands (Assaad et al., 2017). Even though female labor market participation remains relatively low, household surveys suggest that women contribute a significant share to household budgets (ERF, 2014). The persistence of gender discriminatory inheritance law has been associated with women’s precarization not only in Tunisia, but also in Morocco and Egypt, and particularly when it comes to land bequests: if not entirely left out, women tend to receive the least fertile lands (Tanner, 2020; Conseil National des Droits de l’Homme, 2015; Khodary, 2018). Gender discrimination in inheritance is thus an urgent but so far understudied policy issue in the MENA region and beyond.

Tunisia was the first MENA country where a large social movement demanded gender equal inheritance law. The reform proposal received presidential support in 2018, but it never reached a parliamentary vote. The legal status quo remains unchanged and the introduction of a gender equal inheritance law seems increasingly unlikely. But legal reform may not be the only way to weaken gender discrimination in inheritance. The Tunisian Code on Personal Status allows parents to make gifts to a person of their choice. If parents gift assets, property or land to their daughter while alive, the remaining wealth is split according 2
to Islamic inheritance law after their death - but the gender discrimination in the final wealth allocation is attenuated. Collecting novel survey data, I first provide correlational and descriptive evidence to assess to what extent gifting represents a second-best alternative to legal reform. Second, within a survey experiment I test whether providing information on public support for inheritance law reform and/or the possibility to gift one’s daughter has a causal impact on attitudes regarding women’s inheritance.

The primary data necessary for answering these research questions was collected in Tunisia between February and April 2023 via the phone. The total sample size in the first survey round was N=1,505. Respondents were randomly allocated to control (C), or to two different treatment arms where they received information on gifting (T1) or information on public reform support and gifting (T2). The second treatment T2 included a belief correction: respondents were told whether they underestimated, overestimated or correctly guessed public support for the introduction of gender equal inheritance law. I test the effect of the provided information on a set of inheritance-related gender attitudes, which are measured in a first endline directly following the treatment and in a second endline about four weeks later. I hypothesized that both treatments would increase respondents’ awareness of gender discrimination in inheritance and should thus lead to more gender equal attitudes. Yet, I conjectured that reform support may decrease in the treatment groups if gifting is viewed as a substitute for legal reform. Moreover, assuming that the perceived social norm functions as a constraint on individuals’ gender attitudes, the belief correction in T2 was expected to render the views of respondents who underestimate public reform support more gender progressive.

The observed treatment effects are mixed: T1 significantly increases respondents’ likelihood to favor a gender equal bequest allocation. Treatment effects on the other main outcomes - reform support and willingness to use gifting to achieve a more gender equitable bequest allocation - are positive but shy of statistical significance. Furthermore, these effects largely disappear when the gifting information is paired with reform information in T2. Firstand second-order beliefs are strongly correlated: underestimating the public’s support for legal reform is the best predictor of an individual’s own gender attitudes, including support for inheritance law reform.<sup>1</sup> Almost 60 percent of the respondents in the survey underestimate

> 1Here and in the following I use the term “first-order belief” to refer to an individual’s own beliefs. i.e. “I am favorable to introducing gender equal inheritance law.” I use the term “second-order belief” to refer to an individual’s perception of what others believe. i.e. “I think that the majority of Tunisians are opposed to introducing gender equal inheritance law.”

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public reform support and I find that individuals who do so are 29 percentage points less likely to support legal reform than individuals who hold correct second-order beliefs. Yet, the belief correction in T2 does not yield the results one would expect if individuals felt constrained by the belief that others disapprove of reforming the legal status quo: respondents who underestimate (overestimate) reform support show positive (negative) treatment effects on all three outcomes, but they are not statistically significant. By contrast, treated respondents who hold _correct_ beliefs are significantly less likely to choose a gender equal bequest and to support reform. I argue that, in contrast to what has been found by the previous literature with respect to beliefs about women’s labor market participation (Bursztyn et al., 2020) and political participation (Gulzar et al., 2020), the perceived social norm is unlikely to be the binding constraint in this context.

I propose two complementary ways of reconciling these findings theoretically. First, I show that respondents who underestimate (overestimate) public reform support are generally less (more) likely to endorse gender progressive attitudes themselves. Bursztyn et al. (2020) and several other studies find that second-order beliefs causally affect first-order beliefs; the perceived social norm shapes individual preferences. However, I argue that the direction of the causality is not clear. It is also possible that first-order beliefs shape second-order beliefs - individual preferences determine what is perceived to be the social norm. In the context of this study, respondents may believe that the public hesitates to support gender equality in inheritance _because_ they themselves do not support it. If this is the case, correcting secondorder beliefs would not necessarily lead to a revision of first-order beliefs. Second, based on previous literature in related fields, I argue that this unexpected treatment effect pattern may be explained by the underlying characteristics of respondents, i.e. respondents who underestimate (overestimate) public reform support may differ from respondents who hold correct perceptions on substantive grounds.

In the control group, respondents who underestimate (overestimate) public reform support are the least (most) likely to hold progressive gender attitudes. Respondents who underestimate public reform support appear to be part of the educated and wealthy elite of the country. By contrast, respondents who guess correctly appear to situate themselves somewhere closer to the middle of the opinion spectrum. They make extensive use of social media and are well informed about the Tunisian feminist movement. I argue that they are likely to be the political moderates whose attitudes are malleable. This finding relates to a growing literature which assesses the effectiveness of information to shape political opinions. Alesina et al. (2018b), Alesina et al. (2018c) and Haaland and Roth (2023) for instance 4
have found that individuals who hold strong political beliefs are less likely to respond to informational treatments. The finding that respondents who hold correct beliefs react more strongly to treatment may thus be due to their relatively more moderate political opinions and their interest in social issues. From a policy perspective, this is a highly relevant finding as these are the respondents who should be targeted for policy interventions. However, it also implies that belief correction is unlikely to be a policy solution in this context. The group of “political moderates” is small. Hence, even though a majority of respondents underestimates public reform support, correcting this misperception does not appear to be an efficient treatment. Future research should investigate alternative strategies.

Beyond the experimental results, this study presents new descriptive and correlational evidence on demand for gender equality in inheritance in a context where Islamic inheritance law continues to be applied. Overall, support for the introduction of a secular gender equal inheritance law is low: only about one in three respondents favors legal reform. This stands in a striking contrast with approval of gifting: two in three respondents report that they are willing to gift their daughter to attenuate gender discrimination in inheritance. The descriptive data also confirms that gifting is fairly wide-spread in Tunisia: in the surveyed sample, 27 percent of respondents have first-hand experience with gifting, meaning that they have received a gift themselves, are married to someone who has received a gift, or they have gifted a daughter or female relative (see table 3).

However, this does not mean that gifting is a readily available alternative to legal reform for the whole population the population. I show that older age cohorts are more likely to favor gifting over reform, as are the most educated, wealthy and religious individuals. Conversely, demand for legal reform is significantly higher among women and individuals with low educational attainment. Taken together, these findings suggest that gifting indeed represents a socially acceptable alternative to legal reform of gender discriminatory inheritance law in Tunisia - but mostly for a relatively well-off subsample of the population.

My research relates to a larger literature on gender discrimination and inheritance, which has shown that well-intended legal reform may fail to empower women in the presence of regressive gender norms (Rosenblum, 2015; Roy, 2015 and Bhalotra et al., 2020). Changing gender discriminatory social norms is therefore a prerequiste for successful legal reform and sustainable development (Sunstein, 1996; Bertrand, 2020). This is likely to apply to the context of gender discrimination in wealth transmission: encouraging the practice of gifting one’s daughter could theoretically affect social norms around women’s access to property, 5
decreasing the cost of holding progressive gender attitudes and preparing the grounds for successful legal change in the long run (Banerjee, 1992; Mehmood et al., 2022). The descriptive evidence this study provides clearly shows that women in practice rarely make gifts. This implies that potential interventions aiming to encourage the use of gifting should focus on male family heads. However, men tend to hold more conservative gender norms than women, and the data shows that both sons and daughters receive gifts. A policy intervention must therefore be carefully designed and take into account that women until now only often do not dispose of the necessary asset ownership or bargaining power to make gifts. Considering these caveats, gifting is certainly not a panacea to gender discriminatory inheritance law and practices. It can be a viable second-best solution for a wealthy subset of the population with progressive gender views, though.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first study to quantify the demand for gender equal inheritance arrangements in a context where Islamic inheritance law continues being applied. Furthermore, it is the first to assess the potential tradeoff between the introduction of secular gender equal inheritance law and gifting one’s daughter. The descriptive and correlational evidence this study provides suggests that gifting is fairly widespread and, acknowledging the caveats mentioned above, can allow to strengthen the economic empowerment of women from comparably wealthy and gender progressive families. Section 2 provides more background information on the related literature and the institutional setting. Section 3 offers a detailed description of the data collection and experimental design, as well as my conceptual framework and empirical strategy. Section 4 discusses descriptive statistics, regression results, robustness checks and limitations of the study. Section 5 concludes.

# **2 Background Information**

## **2.1 Related Literature**

This study tests the effectiveness of information on gifting and reform support for changing gender norms. While this is to the best of my knowledge the first study to investigate this particular question, there is a growing body of literature using informational experiments. These experiments create exogenous variation in how people perceive their environment, allowing researchers to gain a better understanding of individual choices and preferences. Information provision experiments have for instance been used to analyze individual demand 6
for redistribution (e.g. Alesina et al., 2018c or Fehr et al., 2020, Settele, 2022), xenophobic and discriminatory behavior (e.g. Alesina et al., 2018a or Grigorieff et al., 2020) or health choices (e.g. Dupas, 2011, Barari et al., 2020). A growing number of studies use informational experiments to provide a better understanding of gender norms: Bursztyn et al. (2020) show that correcting misperceived gender norms can increase female labor market participation in Saudi Arabia. Grewenig et al. (2020a) show that prescriptive gender norms have a causal impact on adolescents’ expected labor market participation in Germany. Settele (2022) uses divergent information on the gender wage gap in the US to analyze how beliefs drive the individual demand for affirmative action.

A large literature in economics theorizes and analyzes individuals’ bequest behavior in societies where gender equality between siblings is the legal norm. A smaller literature has considered the trade-off between making gifts and bequests. Lundholm and Ohlsson (2000)’s model shows that it is optimal for parents to make inter-vivo gifts to compensate their less well-off children in the US context where equal bequest allocation is the social norm. According to their assumption, bequests are public information while gifts are private information. By making gifts, parents can deviate from the social norm of making equal transfers without negative reputational effects.

Within a vignette experiment run online in Germany, Tisch and Gutfleisch (2022) assess the principles which guide individuals’ allocation of monetary gifts among siblings of different sexes. The dominating principle is gender equality. However, they also find evidence for the “equity” and “need” principles: sons _and_ daughters are assigned larger monetary amounts when they help their parents or when they are unemployed. There is some evidence of gender discriminatory preferences, though: the monetary reward for helping their parents appears to be higher for sons. Conversely, unemployed daughters receive more extra money than unemployed sons.

This paper also relates to a larger literature on the importance of law for development. The economics literature provides evidence that equal inheritance spurs long-term growth and prosperity (Bartels et al., 2020). While a lot of the recent literature focuses on social norms, Htun et al. (2019) argue that it is _legal_ restrictions to women’s agency which best predict women’s economic empowerment, measured as the share of women who have their own bank account, own firms and participate in the labor force. Gonzales et al. (2015) argue that legal gender discrimination is positively related to large gender gaps in labor market participation.

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In contexts where legal reform has been enacted, observational studies can measure the causal impact of introducing gender equal inheritance law. Women in Western countries progressively gained property and inheritance rights in the 19<sup>_th_</sup> and 20<sup>_th_</sup> century. Shammas (1994) argues that the Married Women Property Acts which were progressively adopted by US states from 1839 improved the legal situation of women. According to the historian, the percentage of wealth owned by women in the US increased more between 1860 and 1890 than in the two centuries preceding the acts. The quantiative evidence on the effectiveness of legal reform is at best mixed, though: the experience of India illustrates that policy makers’ attempt to increase women’s access to inheritance may backfire when restrictive gender norms prevail. Using a difference-in-differences approach Rosenblum (2015) shows that granting daughters the right to inherit ancestral lands in five Indian states increased the mortality of girls - the law seems to have incentivized parents to invest less in the health of their daughters. Bhalotra et al. (2020) confirm that the introduction of gender equal inheritance rights led to higher female infant mortality and an increase in the use of sonbiased fertility stopping rules in India. Roy (2015) argues that the reform at best remained ineffective - in reality, daughters’ access to ancestral land did not increase. By contrast, families compensated them with higher dowries or increased investment in their daughters’ education.

Gender discrimination in wealth transmission may persist even where the law is gender equal: Bessi`ere and Gollac (2023) show that gender discrimination in wealth transmission is commonplace in the US and Europe and has even increased in France over the past two decades. Inter-vivo gifts can be one way for families to favor sons. Moreover, land, real estate property or family businesses are most commonly passed on to (first-born) sons with daughters being paid out “their” share. According to Bessi`ere and Gollac (2023), notaries often deliberately undervalue these assets so they can stay in the family - leading to a discrimination of the children, most often daughters and younger sons, who are paid out. Social norms and the practices of notaries and lawyers can thus contribute to the persistence of gender discrimination in wealth transmission despite gender equal inheritance law.

# **2.2 Gender Issues in Tunisia**

The legal and social context of the MENA region and Tunisia in particular differs from the South Asian context, which has been researched much more extensively: there are no reports of gender-biased abortions or the use of son-based stopping rules in the region. Historically, 8
Tunisia is known for being the regional front runner with respect to women’s rights: the country abolished repudiation and polygamy upon the passage of its 1956 civil code (LatteAbdallah, 2012). Abortion was legalized in 1973, earlier than in France and Italy. Women have outnumbered men in higher education since the late 1990s (Assaad et al., 2017 and World Bank, 2022a) and have reached top positions in the public and private sector. In 2021, Nejla Bouden became the first female prime minister of the Arab world (Terriennes, 2021). Yet, gender discrimination remains problematic, especially when it comes to women’s labor market participation and property rights. Policy makers and human rights activists in Tunisia and the larger MENA region have argued that legal dispossession increases women’s vulnerability and hinders sustainable development. Women often cede the share of the bequest which they are legally entitled to male family members (see Conseil National des Droits de l’Homme, 2015) for the case of Morocco). According to a mixed method study conducted by Khodary (2018) in Egypt, this is especially common when the inheritance concerns agricultural land. The author argues that improving women’s access to inheritance is likely to have a very positive impact on development outcomes, but her results are mostly correlational.

In 2000, the Tunisian women’s rights advocate Yosra Frawes started a first unsuccessful petition in favor of gender equality in inheritance (Dahmani, 2018). The Tunisian Revolution ended the regime of Ben Ali and started a process of democratization in 2011. Article 21 of the 2014 constitution confirmed gender equality _before the law_ : “All citizens, male and female, have equal rights and duties, and are equal before the law without any discrimination” (Constitute Project, Org., 2014).<sup>2</sup> For progressive observers, President B ́eji Ca ̈ıd Essebsi’s creation of the COLIBE Committee in 2017 therefore seemed the logical continuation of the country’s reform efforts. Among other things, the Committee proposed an attenuated inheritance law reform according to which the family head would be allowed to bequeath a larger share to his male descendants if he expressed the wish to do so in a written testament. In the absence of explicit action, gender equality would be applied. Conservative voices, however, claimed that this proposal contradicted the first article of the constitution, which confers the status of state religion to Islam. A heated political discussion emerged and spilled over to other MENA countries where Tunisia has been perceived as a political role model (Constitute Project, Org., 2014, Blaise, 2019 & Zaireg, 2018). By contrast, the proposal for

> 2Some Tunisian legal scholars contest that gender equality _in terms of citizenship_ as defined in the constitution of 2014 establishes the right to equal inheritance rights, one reason being that inheritance falls into the _private sphere_ , not the public sphere, to which the constitution applies (see for example Verdier„ 2020).

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a gender equal inheritance law was never voted upon in the Tunisian parliament. With the Covid-19 pandemic, Essebsi’s death and the enduring political crisis in Tunisia, the question disappeared from the political agenda. The current Tunisian president Ka ̈ıs Sa ̈ıed is fiercely opposed to inheritance law reform (Verdier, 2020) and the 2022 constitution maintains the gender discriminatory dispositions of Islamic inheritance law. Since the reforms of Atat ̈urk in Turkey in the 1920s, no MENA country has succeeded to reform inheritance law (Baderin, 2021) making Tunisia an interesting and particularly relevant case study.

# **2.3 Institutional Setting**

This research focuses on gender discrimination and restrictive social norms in the context of Islamic inheritance law, a so far understudied setting. Muslim-majority countries have seen an extensive secularization in penal and in commercial law, but much less so in family law (Sait and Lim, 2008). Inheritance law is considered as one of the last strongholds of Islamic jurisprudence in North Africa, the Middle East and East Asia. Examples of other Muslimmajority countries applying Islamic inheritance law include Morocco (Zaireg, 2018), Egypt (Berger and Sonneveld, 2010), Sudan (K ̈ondgen, 2010), Jordan (Baderin, 2021), Saudia Arabia (van Eijk, 2010), the United Arab Emirates (Baderin, 2021), Iran (Mir-Hosseini, 2010), Pakistan (Lau, 2010), Bangladesh (Shoma, 2019), the Maldives (OECD Development Centre, 2019) and Indonesia (Otto, 2010). Out of the 171 countries analyzed by Htun et al. (2019) in their cross-country analysis of legal gender discrimination, almost 20 percent maintained gender discriminatory inheritance law between sons and daughters. This makes gender discrimination in inheritance the second most common form of legal discrimination that women face in the world, second only to the inability to confer their nationality to their spouse.

In a historical perspective, Islamic inheritance law was gender progressive, putting women in a more privileged position than in Western Europe where they often did not have a legal identity separate from that of their husband until the end of the 19<sup>_th_</sup> century. The fact that women receive a smaller inheritance share than men is generally justified with the argument that Islamic law obliges a husband to provide shelter, clothing, food and medical assistance to his wife (Sait and Lim, 2008).<sup>3</sup> Yet, the changing social reality in many Muslim-majority

> 3There is no dowry or brideprice: Islamic law prescribes “mahr” which is a payment from the groom to the bride, not to her family. It is meant to allow the wife to survive if her husband were to die and it may have to be paid back in the case of divorce. However, over the years the practice of “mahr” has nearly

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countries increasingly questions the validity of this argument.

Inheritance is strictly regulated in Islam: the Qur’an and the Sunnah lay down precise rules for the division of bequests among the “designated heirs” of a deceased individual, that is, their surviving parents, spouse and children. These rules encompass the deceased’s monetary wealth, real estate property and land. All four legal schools in Islam uphold the “two-shares-one-share” rule for bequests from parents to their sons and daughters which this study focuses on.<sup>4</sup> Citing from the Qur’an, “Allah commands you regarding your children: the share of the male will be twice that of the female [...]” (Tanner; 2020). In a nutshell, the bequest allocated to a son must be double the size of that allocated to a daughter.

The precise bequest allocation will depend on the family composition. As an illustration, consider the case of a man who is survived only by his two children, one son and one daughter. According to Islamic inheritance law, the son will receive two-thirds and the daughter onethird of the total bequest. If the man were survived by three children, one son and two daughters, the son would receive one-half and each of the daughters one-fourth of the total bequest. The existence of other family members may affect the total size of the bequest allocated to the man’s children, but not the gender discriminatory split between siblings. Assume the man is survived by his wife and his two children, one son and one daughter. In this case, the wife will inherit one-eighth of the total bequest. The remaining seveneighths of the bequest will then be split between the son and the daughter according to the “two-shares-one-share” rule: the son will receive seven twelfths and the daughter will receive seven twenty-fourths of the bequest, half as much as the son. Thus, the composition of the surviving family may impact how much the children inherit, but it does not change the fact that a daughter receives half as much as a son.<sup>5</sup> Inheritance tax does not affect the gender disappeared in Tunisia. President Bourguiba led a secularization campaign since 1956. In the occasion of his own wedding in 1962, he only paid one “symbolic dinar” as mahr to comply with the Islamic law. Amendments to the Code of Personal Status have specified that the “mahr” being paid does not have to be of a sizable amount (Fournier, 2013).

> 4Note that here and in the following, I focus on bequests from a parent to their children, which is one - if not the most - common form of inheritance, and the one that was targeted by the Tunisian reform proposal. Islamic law with respect to bequests _from_ children _to_ parents, for example, does not discriminate by gender, meaning that the mother and the father will receive equal shares of the bequest. I disregard Islamic inheritance law regarding other family relationships in this study in order to focus on the inheritance mechanism which is economically and sociologically the most relevant: the one from parents to children.

> 5Maybe not very surprisingly, the sophistication of Islamic inheritance law stimulated some important contributions of medieval Islamic mathematicians to algebra (Gandz; 1938). Most notably, Al-Hassar, a mathematician specialized in inheritance law from nowadays Morocco, developed the notation for fractions which is still commonly used today (Høyrup; 2009). With the arrival of the Internet, online calculators have been developed to address the issue (Sait and Lim; 2008).

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# discriminatory bequest allocation.<sup>6</sup>

Testaments can generally not be used to change the inheritance allocation among one’s children.<sup>7</sup> By contrast, if done while the parent is alive, gifting offers a way of modifying the final bequest allocation. Art. 200 XII of Tunisian Code on Personal Status establishes the procedure of “hiba” (English “gift” or “donation”). Individuals may make gifts while alive; i.e. they can favor their daughter(s) by transferring a property title, land or other assets to them. Upon the parent’s death, the remaining wealth will be split according to Islamic inheritance law. If done _pre-mortem_ , this is thus a procedure which can allow parents to arrange a more gender-equal bequest split among their children under the legal status quo. By significantly reducing property registration fees, the Tunisian Law 69 of October 28, 2006, even creates a fiscal benefit for gifts to one’s children.<sup>8</sup> According to Kuran (2011), Islamic societies have used gifting for centuries to avoid excessive wealth fragmentation. Anecdotal evidence suggested that most Tunisians are aware of gifting but may not view it as a means of tackling the gender discriminatory inheritance allocation imposed by the law. This survey experiment leverages gifting, an existing alternative to inheritance law reform, as part of an informational treatment. The next section provides a detailed description of the experimental design.

> 6In Tunisia, inheritance taxation increases with the kinship _degree_ . i.e. sons and daughters will pay a 2.5 percent registration fee on the value of inherited goods. This fee increases to 5 percent for bequests received from siblings, 25 percent for bequests from uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces or cousins and 35 percent for bequests from individuals of an even higher kinship degree. Inheritance taxation does not differ by the gender of the heir.

> 7The use of testaments in Islamic law is very limited. Islamic law allows the individual to freely dispose of up to one-third of their total wealth to bequeath it to another person or association. According to Art. 171 XI of the Tunisian Code on Personal Status this can be done using a written testament and if the amount to be bequeathed does not exceed one-third of the individual’s total wealth, the consent of the “designated heirs” (surviving parents, spouse and children) is not needed. However, a bequest to one of the designated heirs which will increase their share relative to that foreseen by the Qur’anic rules requires the consent of the other designated heirs. In practice, a will can therefore only be used to increase a daughter’s inheritance share if the other heirs, i.e. her brothers, agree.

8Gifts from parents to children which are registered after this date are subject to a flat tax of 15 Tunisian dinars per act of registration. Previously, they had been subject to a proportional property registration tax just as bequests. The property registration fees for gifts and bequests coincide for transfers among individuals of a higher degree of kinship. i.e. as bequests, gifts from sisters or brothers will be subject to a registration fee of 2.5 percent of the value of the good, 5 percent for gifts from uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces or cousins and 35 percent for gifts from individuals of a higher degree of kinship.

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# **3 Data and Experimental Design**

## **3.1 Data Collection and Sample**

This research is based on a phone survey, conducted between February and April 2023 and targeting a sample of 1,505 adults. The response rate was 35 percent. The survey duration was on average 37 minutes. Respondents did not receive any financial or other benefits for participating in the survey. The survey questions were translated to colloquial Tunisian Arabic and extensively piloted in January 2023. Figure 1 displays a timeline of the data collection process.

**Figure 1:** Timeline

<!-- Start of picture text --> First Second<br>endline endline<br>Dec. 2022 Jan. 2023 Feb. 2023 Mar. 2023 Apr. 2023<br>Data collection<br><!-- End of picture text --> The final sample was obtained by random digital dialing: phone numbers are generated randomly taking into account the country-specific area codes, which allows to reach a fairly representative sample of survey respondents (Stasny, 2001). This naturally generates a stratification by governorate and we furthermore stratified by gender to reach equal shares of female and male respondents in the first survey round.

## **3.2 Experimental Design**

## **3.2.1 Baseline Survey**

Figure 2 provides an illustration of the experimental design. A baseline survey collected relevant socio-economic characteristics (gender, age, governorate of residence, number of siblings, marital status, number of children if any, educational attainment, employment status). The baseline survey also contained questions on respondents’ level of religious 13
conservatism,<sup>9</sup> use of social media, exposure to the local feminist movement,<sup>10</sup> as well as a subsample of questions from the Crowne-Marlowe social desirability scale (for robustness checks as in Dhar et al., 2022; Mehmood et al., 2022). The Online Appendix contains a full list of these items.

# **3.2.2 Treatments**

The experiment had two treatment arms: T1 only provides information on gifting. T2 first corrects respondents’ beliefs about public reform support and then provides information on gifting. After the baseline survey, all respondents were asked about their beliefs regarding public support for inheritance law reform:

**[Second-Order Beliefs - all respondents:]** Now let’s talk about the opinions of _other_ Tunisians:

1. Out of 10 _women_ chosen at random from Tunisia, how many do you think believe that daughters should inherit as much as sons?

2. Similarly, out of 10 _men_ [...]?

3. In your opinion, how many of these _(answer)_ women would support a legal reform making gender equality in inheritance the legal norm in Tunisia?

4. Similarly, how many of these _(answer)_ men [...]?

After these questions, respondents were randomly allocated to T1, T2 and C in roughly equal shares. The interviews of respondents who were allocated to C directly continued with the outcome measures. Only individuals in T2 were informed about the true level of support for legal reform:

> 9Respondents were asked whether the sale of pork and alcohol should be legal in Tunisia, whether banks should be allowed to charge interest, whether religious leaders such as sheiks and imams should have a say in Tunisian politics and whether Islamic inheritance law forms part of Tunisian national identity. I construct a measure of religious conservatism based on these items using principal component analysis. The individual items as well as the index measure are highly correlated with self-reported religiosity.

> 10The baseline survey included questions asking respondents whether they knew Halima Jouini, Yosra Frawes and Bochra Belhaj Hmida, three prominent Tunisian feminists, #EnaZeda, the local offspring of #MeToo, and whether they had a family member or friend who identified as a feminist. All survey items are highly correlated among each other and I construct a measure of exposure to feminism with principal component analysis based on these items.

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**[Belief Correction - Only T2:]** According to your previous answers, overall you expect about -<sup>_a_</sup> out of 10 Tunisian men and women to support a legal reform making gender equality in inheritance the legal standard in Tunisia. Is this correct? _[Record_

_respondent’s answer, allow for correction]_ _Answer:_ You indeed overestimated / underestimated this percentage / guessed correctly. A recent survey found that about 35% of Tunisian men and women support legal reform.<sup>_b_</sup>

> _a_ Average of items 3. and 4, rounded to the next integer.

> _b_ The stated percentage is based on a nationally representative study conducted by the researcher in Tunisia in March 2022. The question is specific and the respondents were not aware of the correct answer as the study results had not been published.

Depending on their priors, this information may lead treated respondents to update their perceptions of public support for inheritance law reform upwards or downwards. The perceptions of respondents in T1 were not corrected.

Respondents in both treatment groups received the following information on gifting.

**[Gifting Info - T1 & T2:]** Did you however know that there are alternative ways of arranging a more gender equitable bequest without legal reform?

Gifting, as defined in art. 200 XII of the Code of Personal Status is a way of transferring assets to the person of one’s choice. By “gifting” their daughter, parents can arrange a more gender equitable inheritance split, and Law 69 of October 28, 2006, even creates a fiscal benefit for donations to one’s children by significantly reducing property registration fees.

# **3.2.3 Endline Surveys and Outcomes**

Two endline surveys evaluated the causal effect of these treatments. The first directly followed the information treatment. The first main outcome asks respondents to choose their ideal bequest allocation in a hypothetical scenario. They were asked to allocate a bequest between two children, a son and a daughter. The most common answer was “two shares-oneshare”, which is the allocation prescribed by Islamic law. In this case, the “ideal bequest” 15
variable is coded as “0”. Whenever respondents deviated to a “one-share-one-share” or 50-50 split, this variable was coded as “1”. This outcome tests the hypothesis that the treatment leads subjects to favor a more gender equitable split.

The two other main outcomes directly assess respondents’ support for legal reform and the use of gifting: respondents were asked whether they were personally in favor of inheritance law reform. Next, they were asked whether they would be willing to gift their daughter in order to achieve a more gender equal bequest allocation. These two outcomes were rated on a 4-point Likert scale. I code them as “1” whenever a respondent strongly or somewhat favors the gender equal option and “0” otherwise. My pre-analysis plan specified further outcomes which are dropped in the following analysis as they yield very similar results.

# **Main Outcomes:**

1. **Ideal Bequest:** Assuming that you can freely allocate a bequest between your two children, a son and a daughter, how would you split the bequest among them?

2. **Reform Support:** “I am personally in favor of making gender equality in inheritance the legal norm in Tunisia.” _(4-point Likert-scale)_ 3. **Gifting:** “I would want my sons and daughters to inherit the same and if necessary, would use gifting to ensure this.” _(4-point Likert-scale)_ I collected a number of secondary outcomes to assess the prevalence of gifting in Tunisia: respondents were asked whether they or their spouse had received a gift and whether they had gifted their daughter or another female relative, if they did not have a daughter. Finally, respondents were asked how credible they find the information provided and whether they consent to participate in a follow-up survey.

Four to eight weeks later, respondents who had given consent were recontacted.<sup>11</sup> The follow-up did not remind respondents of the initial survey or the information provided: the introduction was changed and several unrelated questions were included to limit associations with the initial survey. All main outcomes were measured again and I also included more general measures of gender norms. The enumerators moreover inquired whether respondents

> 11Grewenig et al. (2020a), Grewenig et al. (2020b) and Settele (2022) conducted the second endline after two weeks. Two to four weeks distance to treatment are common choices in the experimental literature.

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<!-- Start of picture text --> Baseline and 2nd Order Beliefs<br>Belief a<br>Correction<br>Gifting Info ||Gifting Info<br>1st Endline<br>after 4 weeks: 2nd Endline<br><!-- End of picture text -->
I would conclude that the effect of increasing the _salience_ of the topic dominates (Grewenig et al., 2020a): the gifting information nudges respondents to think more about women’s rights to inheritance and induces them to adopt more gender progressive views.

As stated in the pre-analysis plan, analysis of to what extent T1 and T2 differ in their effects was of exploratory nature. On the one hand, by revealing true reform support, T2 makes clear that legal reform is unlikely and private action is needed. This may reinforce the information about gifting and increase potential treatment effects. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence suggested that many Tunisians believe that there are more urgent issues to tackle than gender discrimination in inheritance. Many seemed tired of the debate on gender equal inheritance. I thus did not exclude that the belief correction in T2 could create a backlash reaction in some respondents.

# **3.4 Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and Mechanisms**

T2 exploits differences in respondents’ prior perceptions of reform support, allowing for extensive heterogeneity analysis. I use this treatment arm to assess to what extent the perceived social norm represents a constraint on individual attitudes. Do people become more favorable towards gender equal inheritance arrangements upon finding out that their peers are more gender progressive than they thought? Assuming that the perceived social norm causally influences individual attitudes, I expected the effects of T2 to increase in the degree of misperception: treated respondents who underestimate public support for legal reform should update their beliefs, realizing that the social norm is more progressive than they thought. They should thus be more likely to endorse a gender equitable inheritance arrangement and report a higher probability of using gifting to reach such an allocation than respondents in the control group who hold similar misperceptions. Such a finding would be consistent with information-based updating as documented in the previous literature (for example Bleemer and Zafar, 2018; Grewenig et al., 2020a and Bursztyn et al., 2020). Equivalently, I hypothesized that T2 would decrease demand of legal reform in respondents who initially overestimate public support because they learn that the public opinion is less progressive than they thought.

How the belief correction would affect the trade-off between legal reform and gifting is theoretically ambiguous. Let us take the perspective of a respondent who initially overestimates reform support. On the one hand, learning that the public is less supportive of legal 18
reform than one had thought may increase willingness to take private measures given that a legal reform is perceived as more unlikely. This channel would lead to an increase in willingness to gift among treated respondents who overestimated reform support. On the other, the belief correction may decrease willingness to take private measures if the individual is afraid of violating the social norm (as in Paler et al., 2018). The sign of the estimated coefficient on the interaction between treatment and overestimating reform support may reveal which of the two channels dominates. The treatment effect on individuals who misperceive the support for legal reform on the ideal bequest and gifting outcomes was thus unclear in my theoretical framework. I hypothesized that it would likely depend on factors such as religious conservatism and ability to resist social pressure.

The second endline was meant to evaluate whether potential treatment effects still persist several weeks later. It is less likely that treatment effects are driven by experimenter demand effects or numerical anchoring if they are still observed several weeks later (see Stantcheva, 2022). Additional more general measures of gender attitudes intended to assess whether there are “spill-over” effects of the treatment, making respondents revise their gender attitudes even with respect to other gender issues which are not directly related to inheritance.

# **3.5 Empirical Strategy**

I estimate the causal effect of the two treatments _Tj_ with _j ∈{_ 1 _,_ 2 _}_ using the following linear regression model: where _yi_ is the outcome variable measured for individual _i_ , _Xi_ a vector of individual-specific controls, and _α_ 1 the coefficient of interest. All outcomes are coded such that higher values imply more gender equal preferences.

To investigate heterogeneity by prior perceptions of reform support, I implement a procedure akin to Grewenig et al. (2020a). Recall that if allocated to T2, respondents will be told that they underestimated or overestimated public support or guessed correctly. I estimate _′ yi_ = _β_ 0+ _β_ 1 _T_ 2 _i_ + _β_ 2 _T_ 2 _i∗correcti_ + _β_ 3 _T_ 2 _i∗overesti_ + _β_ 4 _∗correcti_ + _β_ 5 _∗overesti_ + _δ Xi_ + _εi_ (2) where _correcti_ and _overesti_ are binary variables that switch on when respondents correctly 19
assess or overestimate the level of public support for inheritance law reform (which is 35 percent). The basegroup is respondents who underestimated reform support and _β_ 1 thus describes the average treatment effect on this group. _β_ 2 describes the additional treatment effect for respondents who held correct perceptions of public reform support. I expected that _β_ 1 _>_ 0, _β_ 2 _<_ 0 and _β_ 3 _<_ 0 - the treatment effect is larger for respondents who initially underestimated reform support than for the other groups. Consistent with social norms influencing private opinion formation, I expected that all else equal _β_ 4 _>_ 0, _β_ 5 _>_ 0 and _β_ 5 _> β_ 4: respondents who held correct perceptions or overestimated the public support for inheritance law reform are more likely to support gender equality in inheritance than those respondents who underestimated reform support.

I furthermore investigate the correlates of support for legal reform and interest in gifting as well as having gifted a daughter using a logit model: where _yi_ is one of the three mentioned outcomes, _Xi_ a vector of individual-level controls and _εi_ an individual-specific error term. Going beyond what was specified in my pre-analysis plan, I estimate the same model using “favoring gifting over reform” as an outcome. This is a binary variable which is coded as “1” when a respondent is more favorable to gifting than to reform and “0” otherwise.

The treatment effect estimated based on the outcomes of the second endline would be biased if assignment to treatment and control predicts participation in the second survey. I therefore check for covariate balance across treatment and control group among those who participated in the second endline and then regress an indicator variable for participation in the follow-up on treatment indicators and covariates. I finally estimate the following model: where _SEi_ is an indicator variable for the observation being collected in the second endline. To test whether treatment effects persist over time, I will test the null hypothesis that _φ_ 1 + _φ_ 2 + _φ_ 3 = 0.

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# **4 Results**

## **4.1 Descriptive Results**

## **4.1.1 Baseline Balance**

Table 1 provides summary statistics of covariate balance at baseline by treatment arm. The respondents in my sample are on average 42 years old. They have 1.9 children on average; 63 percent are married. About one-third of the sample lives in a rural area. Small imbalances are observed with respect to educational attainment. One in four respondents has completed higher education; the percentage is 29 percent in T1 and 23 percent in T2 and control. I control for educational attainment in all regressions and later introduce survey weights as a robustness check.

On average, 42 percent of my sample work full time and 21 percent are homemakers. The Online Appendix compares my sample’s geographical spread by governorate to the latest national statistics (Institut National de la Statistique; 2022a) and shows that it is highly geographically representative. It also compares the share of age cohorts (Institut National de la Statistique; 2022b): younger cohorts are overrepresented in my sample. In the robustness checks, I show that weighing down younger cohorts does not affect my conclusions.

## **4.1.2 Second-Order Beliefs**

The belief that a majority of one’s peers opposes political change may affect individual opinion and behavior. For example, an individual may refrain from taking a particular action or expressing a political opinion because she thinks that society will disapprove of or sanction it. Generalized misperceptions about public opinion may therefore hinder social change and keep society captured in inefficient social equilibria (see Kuran, 1991). When studying socially contentious issues such as the reform of law of religious origin, paying attention to individuals’ perceptions of what is the public opinion - second-order beliefs - is thus crucial.<sup>12</sup> Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6 aggregate respondents’ second-order beliefs about their

> 12I use the term “first-order belief” to refer to an individual’s own beliefs. i.e. “I am favorable to introducing gender equal inheritance law.” I use the term “second-order belief” to refer to an individual’s perception of what others believe. i.e. “I think that the majority of Tunisians are opposed to introducing gender equal inheritance law.” The terms “second-order belief” and perception are thus used interchangeably.

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peers’ support for the introduction of gender equal inheritance law. Second-order beliefs were measured before the assignment of treatment which is why I use the full sample. First-order beliefs were measured in the first endline. The average first order-beliefs are thus computed based on the control group.

Figure 3 aggregates the second-order beliefs of female and male respondents and contrasts them with the actual average first-order beliefs. Unsurprisingly, respondents expect men to be less supportive of legal reform than women: the modal belief is that 0 out of 10 men support legal reform. Perceptions about women’s reform support are much more evenly spread. On average, respondents expect 42 percent of women and 19 percent of men to support legal reform. These second-order beliefs imply that the expected gender gap in reform support amounts to 23 percentage points. This is considerably larger than the actual gender gap revealed by first-order beliefs, which I illustrate with line bars in figure 3: 42 percent of women versus 30 percent of men support a reform. The gender gap in first-order beliefs hence amounts to 12 percentage points, barely more than half the gender gap as measured by second-order beliefs. I conclude that respondents tend to overestimate the gender polarization around the introduction of gender equal inheritance law.

What drives this misperception? Average second-order beliefs regarding women’s reform support are surprisingly close to the true mean. The misperception is driven by respondents underestimating male reform support. One possible hypothesis is that women avoid discussing gender equality in inheritance with men, creating information asymmetry by gender. In that case, we would expect that women have a less accurate understanding of men’s reform support than men (and vice versa for women’s reform support, see Gulzar et al., 2020). But not only women underestimate men’s reform support: figure 6 plots second-order beliefs regarding men’s reform support by gender. The distribution is strongly skewed to the left and there are hardly any differences by gender - men tend to underestimate other men’s reform support just as much as women do. Figure 5 suggests that respondents on average hold quite accurate expectations regarding female reform support. Male respondents tend to give more extreme answers. Overall, respondents tend to overestimate the gender polarization around gender equality in inheritance because they _underestimate_ men’s openness to reform.

Figure 4 presents beliefs aggregated by gender as they were used for administering T2. Almost 60 percent of respondents underestimated public reform support and received the corresponding information if allocated to T2. This is in line with Bursztyn et al. (2023) who find that respondents in relatively less gender progressive countries tend to underestimate 22
support for strengthening women’s rights. Only 27 percent overestimate the public reform support. The remaining 13 percent guessed correctly.

# **4.1.3 Main Outcomes**

The proposal to reform gender discriminatory inheritance law is unpopular in Tunisia. Aggregating both genders, I find that 37 percent of Tunisians are favorable to the introduction of a gender equal inheritance law regime.<sup>13</sup> The other measured outcomes provide a consistent picture of respondents’ attitudes towards gender equality in inheritance as illustrated by figure 7. Among the respondents in the control group, 35 percent of respondents prefer a gender equal inheritance split in the hypothetical bequest scenario. By contrast, reported willingness to gift one’s daughter or another female relative is high: 66 percent of all respondents in the control group declared that they would be willing to use gifting for achieving a more gender equal inheritance split among their children.

Demand for gender equal inheritance arrangements differs by gender: women are significantly more likely to choose the ideal bequest (p-value _<_ 0.05) and significantly more likely to support legal reform (p-value _<_ 0.01). There is no statistically significant gender difference in the willingness to use gifting. The share is the same among respondents with a low score on the social desirability index, which suggests that this finding is not driven by experimenter demand effects. Table 2 shows the average marginal effects from a logit model regressing the main outcomes on respondents’ socio-economic characteristics, as well as second-order beliefs at baseline in the control group. Women are more likely to demand gender equality than men: they are almost 16 percentage points more likely to choose a gender equal ideal bequest and 19 percentage points more likely to favor legal reform, a finding which is significant at the 1 percent level.

Other respondent characteristics matter: differences across age cohorts are not statistically significant but on average, older respondents tend to endorse less gender progressive attitudes than younger respondents. Support for gender equality in inheritance significantly decreases with educational attainment and religiosity. University graduates are 18 percentage points less likely to support legal reform; the decrease is 4 percentage points for highly religious individuals (significant at the 1 percent and 5 percent level). Importantly, respon-

> 13This percentage mirrors the result of my initial survey which was conducted one year earlier in March 2022 and served as the basis for the misperception correction performed in T2.

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dents’ first- and second-order beliefs are strongly correlated: the best predictor of favoring a gender discriminatory bequest allocation and opposing legal reform is underestimating one’s peers openness to reform. Individuals who do so are 24 percentage points less likely to choose a gender equal bequest and 29 percentage points less likely to support legal reform themselves. Both findings are significant at the 1 percent level.

# **4.1.4 Gifting at Baseline**

Making gifts to one’s daughter can only be a viable policy alternative to legal reform if doing so is socially acceptable. Table 3 summarizes respondents’ previous use of and exposure to gifting as reported in the first endline: about 16 percent of respondents have received a gift themselves. The share is 18 percent among male and 14 percent among female respondents - a means difference which is statistically significant at the 10 percent level. About 13 percent report that their spouse has received a gift, and 9 percent of respondents report that they have made a gift to their daughter or another female relative. Men are more likely to make gifts to their daughter or, when they do not have a daughter, to a female relative: 13 percent of male respondents versus only 5 percent of female respondents report having done so in the past. The means difference is statistically significant at the 1 percent level.

The last row of table 3 aggregates these different indicator into one measure of gifting experience, which is defined as having received a gift oneself, one’s spouse having received a gift, or having made a gift to one’s daughter (or female relative when a respondent does not have a daughter). More than one in four respondents in the sample has some previous experience with gifting, confirming that gifting is a common practice in Tunisia. Among men, the share is close to 30 percent. Two stylized facts emerge from this descriptive data which are highly policy relevant: first, men gift more often than women. Second, men are more likely to receive a gift than women.

# **4.2 The Tradeoff between Legal Reform and Gifting**

A majority of Tunisian adults opposes a nationwide reform introducing gender equal inheritance law. Gifting daughters could be perceived as a way of circumventing the gender discriminatory inheritance split imposed by the current law. In the following subsections, I will shed light on the question whether gifting one’s daughters is an alternative to reforming gender discriminatory inheritance law. First, I assess some of the reasons which explain _why_ 24
an individual may be hesitant towards legal change and favor gifting instead. Second, I take a closer look at the correlational evidence to further characterize the tradeoff between legal reform and gifting: _who_ favors gifting over reform?

# **4.2.1 Reasons for Opposing Legal Reform**

# **Efficiency, Necessity and Priority**

An individual may oppose legal reform for many reasons. Legal reform may not be sufficient to promote gender equality if social norms remain biased against women. The literature provides numerous examples of legal reforms that remained inefficient or even backfired. In India, for example, the introduction of gender equal access to ancestral land has been shown to remain ineffective as families continued favoring their sons over their daughters (Roy, 2015). Beyond the main outcomes, I therefore asked respondents to assess whether legal reform would be an efficient way of promoting gender equality in inheritance, whether it was necessary, and whether they considered it a personal or political priority.<sup>14</sup> Efficiency concerns play a role: 55 percent of respondents in the control group doubt that inheritance law reform would effectively strengthen women’s rights. But more strikingly, 79 percent of respondents believe that the introduction of a gender equal law is not necessary. Only 13 percent see legal reform as a personal priority and only 14 percent think it ought to be a political priority. Neither treatment has a significant effect on respondents’ beliefs about the efficiency, necessity and urgency of legal reform. Table 4 presents the estimated average marginal effects from a logit model, regressing the respective outcome on the respondents’ socio-economic characteristics. The model presented is estimated on the control group.

In contrast to the previous findings regarding the demand for gender equal inheritance law and support for gifting, under or overestimating reform does not correlate in a statistically significant way with any of the outcomes. Women and men do not significantly differ in their assessment of the efficiency, necessity and importance of legal reform either: the estimated

> 14The original wording of the items is the following: Efficient: “Establishing gender equality in inheritance in Tunisia would not strengthen women’s rights because the law is often not applied anyways.” Necessary: “Reforming inheritance law in Tunisia is not necessary because the current inheritance law is fair.” Personal Priority: “I have more urgent things to deal with in my daily life than inheritance law reform.” Political Priority: “There are more important policy issues to be taken care of right now than gender equality in inheritance.” The items were reversed and coded as binary variables, such that strong or weak agreement with the gender equal choice is indicated by “1”. Equivalently, “0” indicates that the respondent preferred the gender unequal choice.

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coefficients are close zero. Married individuals tend to hold less gender progressive views: they are almost 13 percentage points less likely to consider that gender equality in inheritance ought to be a political priority. This finding is statistically significant at the 1 percent level.

Legal reform ought to be a particularly important topic for individuals who would be themselves materially affected by reform. Indeed, individuals whose father or mother are alive are significantly more likely to believe that gender equality in inheritance should be a political priority. Consistent with some previous research (see for example Borrell-Porta et al., 2018), respondents who have at least one daughter embrace more gender equal views on average: they are almost 5 percentage points more likely to believe that a legal reform is necessary and about 5 percentage points more likely to consider that it should be a political priority. Interestingly, individuals who have at least one son are also significantly more likely to view gender equality in inheritance as a political priority. Older individuals are significantly less likely to consider gender equality in inheritance a personal priority.

As in the case of the main outcome measures, education correlates negatively with all outcomes: university educated respondents are 14 percentage points less likely to consider legal reform as a personal priority than respondents with only basic education. They are also 13 percentage points less likely to believe it would be an efficient means of promoting gender equality. Material wealth is only a significant predictor of the first outcome: wealthy individuals are 5 percentage points more likely to believe in the efficiency of legal reform (significant at the 1 percent level).

# **Need, Equity, Inter-Generational Exchange**

The fact that a vast majority of respondents believe that legal reform is not necessary implies that they find the status quo fair. A potential explanation would be that they consider that daughters are sufficiently taken care of by their husbands or other male family members. Indeed, 96 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that men are obliged to financially provide for their wives, sisters and mothers (see table 5). The belief that women do not _need_ equal inheritance rights because they receive financial assistance may thus motivate the idea that legal reform is not necessary.

What if a daughter _is_ in need? The survey included an additional outcome which triggered the respondent to re-assess their ideal bequest allocation between a son and a daughter. In this scenario, the daughter had recently divorced after being abused by her husband and the script specified that he no longer provided for her financially (see Online Appendix for 26
the whole script). The respondents were asked whether they wanted to change their ideal bequest allocation. I find that about 10 percent of respondents did so, leading to 52 percent of women and 40 percent of men favoring a gender equal bequest in this scenario. The share of respondents who change their preferences when the daughter is in need is not negligible but not large enough to suggest that economic need is a guiding principle behind respondents’ preferences.

Exchange expectations and equity considerations constitute another, not necessarily competing explanation: sons may be expected to take care of their parents when in old age and it may therefore be fair to compensate them with a higher inheritance share. In a longitudinal study of US women, Light and McGarry (2004) find that exchange is a common explanation for respondents to favor unequal bequest allocations among their children. Similarly, Tisch and Gutfleisch (2022) show that German respondents in an online experiment allocate a significantly larger gift to a child who helps their parents. Inter-generational exchange and equity considerations are not an obvious explanation for respondents’ preference for gender discriminatory law in the Tunisian context, though: 98 percent of respondents consider that a son has the duty to financially support his parents when they get old. The percentage of respondents who believe that a daughter has the duty to financially support her parents when they get old is 93 percent - almost the same.

Table 5 points out some gender differences with respect to these attitudes. Women are significantly more likely to believe that legal reform is necessary than men (24 versus 17 percent). Gender differences in family norms can motivate this finding: women are significantly less likely to adhere to the social norm that a man is responsible of his female family members. They are just as likely to expect a son to financially take in charge his elderly parents as men, but they are significantly more likely to expect daughters to do the same. Gender differences in intergenerational equity concerns may thus partially explain why women are more favorable towards reforming the law than men. Yet, even among women, a majority rejects legal reform and considers it unnecessary.

# **4.2.2 Gifting as a Private Second-Best Alternative?**

From the evidence presented so far, it is clear that the majority of Tunisians oppose a national reform introducing gender equality in inheritance. One of the most commonly held beliefs is that reform is simply not necessary. Considering this finding, I turn to the following 27
# question: To what extent does gifting represent an alternative to legal reform?

I use correlational evidence to shed further light on the potential tradeoff between legal reform and private action in the form of gifting. Table 6 shows the estimated marginal effects from a logit model: as a benchmark, column (1) shows respondents’ stated preferences regarding legal reform. The outcome of column (2) is favoring gifting over reform. This outcome is coded as “1” whenever a respondent is more favorable of gifting than of reform and “0” otherwise. Both models are estimated on the control group. In the first survey wave, 37 percent of the respondents favor gifting over reform. Column (3) uses reported gifts to daughters as an outcome. This outcome was measured in the first endline and is unlikely to have been affected by treatment, which is why I use the whole sample for estimation. As reported in table 3, about 9 percent of the total sample had already made a gift to their daughter. Figure 8 plots the estimated coefficients of interest of model (2) and (3).

Who is most likely to favor gifting over reforming the national law? The best predictor of outcomes 1 and 2 is again underestimating reform support: respondents who do so are 28 percentage points less likely to approve of reform themselves and 25 percentage points more likely to favor gifting. Women are significantly _more_ likely to favor legal reform and significantly _less_ likely to substitute towards gifting than men. Column (3) offers a potential rationalization for this observation: mothers are 6 percentage points less likely to make gifts to their daughters than fathers. Possible reasons may include lower asset and land ownership among women, but also limited bargaining power within the household. It would be desirable to analyze whether gifting is more common among female heads of the household (i.e. widows) but the sample size does not allow a more fine-grained analysis.

Given the gender discriminatory bequest allocation among siblings in Islamic inheritance law, individuals who have a sibling of the opposite sex would be expected to be less willing to embrace legal reform, as it would change the inheritance allocation within their family. The effect should be stronger for men because they would themselves materially suffer from reform as their sister(s) gain equal inheritance right. Consistent with the theory, I find that respondents who have a sibling of the opposite sex are indeed less likely to favor reform (not statistically significant) and 14 percentage points more likely to favor gifting over reform (marginally statistically significant at the 10 percent level). The limited sample size does not allow for analysis by gender.

Higher levels of education are generally associated with more gender equal preferences, as the most recent survey round of the Tunisian Arab Barometer confirms (Arab Barometer; 28
2022). Yet, attitudes towards women’s right to equal inheritance seem to be an exception: column (1) of table 6 clearly shows that reform support linearly decreases with education. University graduates are in fact the least likely to support legal reform. I control for wealth in all regressions, hence, this effect is unlikely to be driven by the correlation of education and wealth. The probability of favoring gifting and reporting an actual gift to one’s daughter increases with education, albeit not in a statistically significant way (see columns 2 and 3).

Religious individuals would be expected to be less supportive of reforming inheritance law but it is not clear that they would favor gifting over reform: gifting daughters does not directly conflict with Islamic inheritance law but highly religious individuals may still disapprove of it if they view it as a way of circumventing the law. The regression results in table 6 shows that respondents who score above the median of the religious conservatism scale are 4 percentage points less likely to support legal reform (significant at the 1 percent level) but not significantly less likely to favor gifting. Gifting may thus to be viewed as an alternative to legal reform, even by some of those who are highly religious.

From a theoretical perspective, it is not clear how wealth impacts attitudes towards women’s right to inheritance. Wealthy families would be more strongly impacted by a legal reform and may therefore be more likely to oppose it. But they also have more possibilities to use gifting. I do not find a significant impact of wealth on attitudes towards reform or having gifted one’s daughter, which is likely due to measurement issues and a lack of statistical power. However, wealthy individuals are 3 percentage points more likely to favor gifting over reform, a finding which is statistically significant at the 10 percent level. This is intuitive if one considers that gifting can only be used to alleviate gender inequality in inheritance in those families that dispose of sufficient assets and property to write over some to their daughters while alive.

# **4.3 Treatment Effects**

# **4.3.1 Main Effects**

Table 7 reports the treatment effects of the pure gifting treatment (T1) and the combined treatment with belief correction and information on gifting (T2) compared to control. All regressions control for baseline second-order beliefs, respondent gender, age, marital status, education, occupation, family covariates, religious conservatism, a wealth index, and rural location. I furthermore include governorate and enumerator fixed effects. All OLS models 29
are estimated using heteroskedasticity robust standard errors.

As expected, T1 has a marginally significant and positive effect on the ideal bequest - treated respondents are 6.9 percentage points more likely to choose a gender equal bequest allocation (significant at the 5 percent level) - but there is no statistically significant effect on the other outcomes. When pairing the information on gifting with belief correction in T2, treatment effects are zero for the first two outcomes and positive but imprecisely estimated for gifting. If anything, adding information on reform to the gifting information seems counterproductive. Yet, these aggregated treatment effects hide considerable heterogeneity by prior beliefs, as illustrated by table 8.

# **4.3.2 By Misperceptions**

Table 8 disaggregates the treatment effects of T2 by prior beliefs. The effects of T2 on the subgroup of respondents who underestimated reform support (almost 60 percent of the sample) are as expected positive on all three outcomes but remain shy of statistical significance. The effects of T2 on the subgroup of respondents who overestimated support are negative, but again remain shy of statistical significance. I test the null hypothesis that the estimated treatment effect on the subgroup of respondents who underestimated reform support equals the treatment effect on the subgroup of respondents who overestimated reform (T2 = T2 x Over). I fail to reject the null hypothesis for all three outcomes. The large p-values reported in the last row of table 8 indicate that there is no statistically significant treatment effect difference between the two groups. This goes against the hypothesis that the treatment would lead to belief updating and strong heterogeneity between these groups. Surprisingly, the treatment effects of T2 on the subgroup of respondents who already hold correct beliefs (Treat 2 + Treat 2 x Correct) is negative and highly statistically significant for the ideal bequest and reform support. Upon receiving T2, respondents holding correct beliefs are more than 20 percentage points less likely to favor a gender equal bequest and almost 20 percentage points less likely to support reform than respondents in control. For the ideal bequest and reform support, the treatment effects on respondents holding correct beliefs significantly differ from the effects on the groups who misperceive public reform support as can be seen from the p-values reported in table 8. For willingness to gift, the treatment effect on respondents holding correct beliefs is zero.

Information-based updating would imply that respondents who underestimated their 30
peers’ reform support become relatively more gender progressive as they realize that their environment is more supportive of gender equality than previously thought (Bleemer and Zafar, 2018). Equivalently, respondents who overestimated reform support would be expected to become less gender progressive. Yet, this theoretical framework would expect them to react more strongly to treatment than respondents who hold correct beliefs. This is not what I observe in the data, suggesting that information-based updating cannot fully account for the observed treatment effect pattern.

How can the strong treatment effects on respondents holding correct beliefs be rationalized? One potential explanation is that respondents who underestimate (overestimate) reform support are inherently different from respondents who hold correct beliefs. In order to explore this hypothesis, I investigate the predictors of respondents’ second-order beliefs. Table 9 shows average marginal effects from a logit model where the outcomes are underestimating public reform support, holding correct beliefs, and overestimating public reform support. Respondents’ gender, family composition, religiosity or wealth do not predict second-order beliefs in a statistically significant way. Education does: the probability of holding pessimistic second-order beliefs significantly increases with education. University graduates are most likely to underestimate public reform support and least likely to overestimate it.

Recall that even in the control group, education is an excellent predictor of holding conservative attitudes with respect to women’s right to inheritance as shown in table 2. This points to another potential explanation of the treatment effect patterns by misperceptions: respondents in the control group who underestimate (overestimate) public reform support are more likely to oppose (support) gender equal inheritance themselves.<sup>15</sup> It is possible that respondents oppose gender equality in inheritance _because_ they believe that their peers oppose gender equality in inheritance (analogous to Kuran (1991) and Bursztyn et al. (2020)). But a priori, the observed correlations do not allow for any conclusions regarding the direction of a potential causality. It is also possible that the respondents themselves oppose gender equality and make inferences on their peers’ gender attitudes based on their own political convictions. In this scenario, first-order beliefs shape second-order beliefs and not the other way round.

> 15When standardizing individual reform support and beliefs regarding public reform support, I find that the correlation of respondents’ reform support and expected reform support in the control group is 0.37 and highly statistically significant. This is in line with the literature review of Bursztyn and Yang (2022) who find that attitudes and beliefs about others tend to correlate positively with individuals’ own beliefs.

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If this mechanism is at work, then the respondents who misperceive public reform support are expected to hold stronger political opinions at baseline. The recent experimental literature suggests that the strength of political opinions at baseline crucially matters for the success of informational interventions: Settele (2022) finds that correcting beliefs about the gender wage gap suffices to shift the policy preferences of Democrats and Independents, but not those of Republicans who tend to hold strong anti-redistribution preferences at baseline. Alesina et al. (2018b) show that the respondents who hold the strongest misperceptions about migrants are the least willing to pay for corrective information, suggesting that respondents’ baseline beliefs limit their response to the informational treatment. In a similar vein, Alesina et al. (2018c) find that correcting information on social mobility increases Democrats’ demand for redistributive policies, but has little effect on Republicans. Given the strong polarization of public opinion on gender equality in inheritance in Tunisia, it is plausible that a similar mechanism is at play: respondents with strong political beliefs are less likely to respond to an informational treatment, which could explain why the observed treatment effects on these subgroups are so weak. Following this reasoning, respondents who hold correct beliefs would be expected to be relatively more moderate in their own political views. As a result, their gender norms may be more malleable and more responsive to an informational treatment.

The treatment effects reported in table 10 provide additional evidence for the hypothesis that the treatment effect pattern is driven by respondents’ underlying characteristics rather than by belief updating. I estimate the same model as reported in table 8 but this time using T1. Recall that T1 only provided information on gifting and did _not_ include a belief correction. Despite this, the same treatment effect pattern persists. Respondents who underestimate public reform support become significantly more likely to choose a gender equal bequest and to support reform. The interaction terms on belonging to T1 and holding correct beliefs or overestimating public reform support are negative. Importantly, respondents who held correct beliefs show very similar treatment effects as in T1. This treatment effect pattern would be roughly consistent with belief updating - but there was no belief correction. The finding that respondents in T1 and T2 react in the same way to treatment allows me to rule out that it is the belief correction in T2 which is driving the observed treatment effect pattern. Instead, it is likely that the treatment effect pattern is driven by something which is shared by respondents allocated to the different treatment arms and which conditions the way they react to the informational treatment: their underlying characteristics.

Table 11 presents a breakdown of respondent characteristics by prior beliefs. Respondents 32
who _underestimate_ public reform support are on average the most highly educated. Moreover, they score highest on the aggregated wealth index and they are the least likely to live in rural areas. Respondents who hold _correct_ beliefs score a bit lower in terms of education and wealth but the difference to the group of respondents who underestimate is not statistically significant. Respondents with correct beliefs are the least religious of the three groups. They use social media more often and have the best knowledge of Tunisian feminism - the differences in means, especially in comparison to respondents who overestimate, are highly statistically significant. They are also most likely to respond that they often or very often think about inheritance matters. Respondents who _overestimate_ public reform support are significantly more likely to favor gender equal outcomes than the other groups. However, they are significantly less educated than respondents who hold correct beliefs, less wealthy and more religious than the other groups. They make significantly less use of social media and are not well-informed about the Tunisian feminist movement. Finally, they score considerably higher on the social desirability index than the other groups. The data thus suggests that that the three groups substantially differ from each other: respondents who underestimate public reform support seem to be part of the educated and wealthy but conservative elite of the country. Respondents who hold correct beliefs have relatively more gender progressive preferences and are significantly more interested in feminism. Conversely, respondents who overestimate support do not seem to be particularly involved in gender questions but display a higher propensity to give socially desirable answers, which may partially explain their high first-order beliefs.

The next subsections will discuss further treatment effects heterogeneity and findings from the second endline.

# **4.3.3 Further Heterogeneity**

In contrast to my pre-registered hypotheses I find little evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects by previous exposure to feminism or levels of religious conservatism. However, treatments effects are considerably larger when the models are estimated on the subsample of respondents whose father has passed away: table 4 in the Online Appendix shows that respondents in T1 in this subgroup are 11 percentage points more likely to opt for a gender equal bequest split than respondents in the control group. This is consistent with respondents’ beliefs being less malleable while their parents are alive; recent research has indeed highlighted the role of older family members in perpetuating restrictive gender norms at 33
home (see for example Anukriti et al., 2020).

Conducting treatment effect analysis by gender suggests that the observed treatment effects are driven by the female respondents. In the female subsample, T1 makes choosing the gender equal bequest almost 13 percentage points more likely, a finding which is significant at the 1 percent level (see table 4 in the Online Appendix). All other treatment effects of T1 are positive and of economically important size, yet statistically not significant, possibly reflecting the smaller sample size. T2 has a statistically significant and positive effect on willingness to use gifting: among the female subsample, the likelihood to favor gifting increases by 10 percentage points (significant at the 5 percent level). This is driven by the female respondents who underestimate support as visible in table 6 of the Online Appendix: they are 11 percentage points more likely to favor gifting as a means of reaching a gender equal bequest allocation, again significant at the 5 percent level. I conclude that female respondents respond more strongly to the informational treatment and show stronger evidence of belief updating. A potential interpretation is that the perceived social norm could act as a constraint on the preferences of female respondents, but less so for male respondents.

Personal interest in inheritance matters is likely to play a decisive role. At baseline, a majority of respondents declared that they never think about inheritance issues. Excluding these respondents from analysis yields interesting results: table 5 in the Online Appendix illustrates that T1 is associated with a statistically significant and sizeable increase in support for legal reform in the subgroup of respondents who sometimes, often or very often think about inheritance. The other treatment effects are also positive but shy of statistical significance. Treatment 2 leads to a large increase in willingness to use gifting which is significant at the 10 percent level. Table 7 in the Online Appendix shows that this increase in willingness to use gifting is driven by respondents who hold correct beliefs, which is in line with the interpretation that their preferences are more malleable. Given the limited sample size, this finding should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, it suggests that individuals who hold an interest in inheritance matters substitute away from gender equal inheritance towards gifting.

# **4.3.4 Second Endline**

More than 90 percent of respondents who were interviewed agreed to being recontacted and 45 percent answered the call, yielding a sample size of N=672. The Online Appendix includes 34
a table with covariate balance of the respondents who were successfully recontacted for the second endline. Overall, respondent characteristics are fairly balanced - the statistically significant imbalances observed with respect to educational attainment mirror those of the first endline. Table 1 in the Online Appendix shows the results from regressing an indicator variable for participation in the second endline on treatment indicators and covariates. The estimated treatment coefficients are not statistically significant, suggesting that attrition did not differ by treatment status. However, older individuals were significantly more likely to answer the call, which is why I weight down their responses in a robustness check reported in the Online Appendix.

Table 12 reports findings from estimating model 4. The follow-up indicator are consistently statistically insignificant. T1 has a zero impact on the ideal bequest chosen by the respondents, which suggests that the treatment effect has faded over time. By contrast, respondents who answered the second call were significantly more likely to show an increase in interest in gifting in the first call. The treatment effect decreases in the follow-up but is still positive and statistically significant at the 5 percent level for T1. Is this finding driven by the fact that older individuals were more likely to answer the follow-up survey? In the Online Appendix, I estimate the same model introducing survey weights to ensure higher representativeness. The results look reassuringly similar. The positive effect of T2 on the willingness to use gifting becomes even stronger and statistically significant at the 5 percent level. The second endline thus suggests that both treatments increased respondents’ willingness to use gifting. The heterogeneity of treatment effects of T2 by prior beliefs persists, which is in line with the hypothesis that respondents who misperceive reform support differ from respondents with correct beliefs on more substantive grounds.

A total of 23 respondents reported having gifted a daughter or another female relative since the first interview. Eight female respondents reported having received a gift since the first interview. However, consistent with the gifting pattern found at baseline (see table 3), I also observe a significant number of gifts towards men. Seven respondents reported having gifted a son or a male relative and ten male respondents having received a gift themselves. Finally, 41 percent of respondents in the second endline reported that it was likely or very likely that they would use gifting to attain a more gender equal inheritance allocation in their families in the future. These numbers do not significantly differ by treatment arm, which is likely to be driven by a lack of statistical power.

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# **4.4 Robustness Checks**

To assess whether the treatment effect heterogeneity of T2 holds for smaller intervals, I estimate the model using deciles. The results are reported in the Online Appendix. The same treatment effect pattern persists: respondents holding correct beliefs are clearly the subgroup who reacts most to treatment.

As a more general robustness check of my findings, I re-estimate the above models without imputing missing baseline covariate values. I also drop the respondents who did not find the provided information credible (1.5 percent) or not very credible (9.1 percent). I next drop respondents who take unusually little time to respond to the survey (less than 20 minutes, 5.5 percent). My main findings also hold for these smaller subsamples. Moreover, I construct an index of respondents’ score on the Crowne and Marlowe (1960) propensity to give socially desirable answers scale and re-estimate my main models on the subsample of those who score in the bottom 6 deciles of the distribution. The positive treatment effect of T1 on the ideal bequest is smaller and no longer statistically significant but still positive. This suggests that some of the treatment effect may be driven by social desirability bias. I estimate all models without imputing missing baseline covariate values. All these results are reported in the Online Appendix.

Finally, to address potential selection bias created by survey non-response, I follow Valliant and Dever (2018) by estimating the pseudo-inclusion probabilities into my survey sample: I treat the Tunisian Labor Market Panel Survey (TLMPS), the most recent face-to-face panel survey (ERF, 2014), as reference probability sample, which I code as “0”. I then append it to my survey data, which I code as “1”. Using a logit model, I estimate _Pr_ ( _y_ = 1 _|X, β_ ), where _X_ is a set of covariates with common support in both samples.<sup>16</sup> This allows me to estimate pseudo-weights, defined as the inverse of the predicted probabilities. This strategy addresses the imbalance with respect to educational attainment which I observe across treatment arms. Moreover, as I show in the Online Appendix, my sample of respondents is highly representative of Tunisia in terms of the geographical spread, but on average younger. Weighting allows me to address this potential concern.

Weighting does not significantly affect my conclusions. Regression results are reported

> 16The set of covariates _X_ includes categories of age, education and occupation, household size, assets, and rural-urban status. I do not impute missing values in ERF (2014). Weighting down highly educated respondents also addresses baseline imbalance in the first treatment arm.

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in the Online Appendix: the treatment effect of T1 on the ideal bequest chosen is smaller but still statistically significant at the 10 percent level. The treatment effect pattern by misperceptions becomes weaker but it is still respondents with correct beliefs who display the strongest treatment effects. Respondents who hold correct beliefs are 19 percentage points less likely to support reform upon receiving treatment 2 (significant at the 10 percent level). Thus, the observation that belief updating is smaller than expected still holds after introducing survey weights.

# **4.5 Limitations**

Observed treatment effects may be driven by (i) the information provided or by (ii) salience of the topic. My experimental design does not allow to disentangle these mechanisms. In addition to the information updating, the treatment may have additional side effects such as “uncertainty reduction, attention, and emotional responses” (Haaland et al., 2020, p.20). Ideally, a third treatment arm would test whether only providing the correct information on public reform support without adding the information on gifting already has an impact on individuals’ preferences.

An obvious issue is potential bias introduced by survey non-response and experimenter demand effects. The questions were framed as neutrally as possible and the enumerators were instructed to avoid influencing the respondent. They received extensive training and were followed by a supervisor during the survey. In the data, I try to minimize this source of bias further by introducing enumerator dummies in all my regressions and estimating survey weights as a robustness check.

Another potential drawback is that this study did not provide financial incentives for belief elicitation, which could have induced low effort on the side of the respondents. However, Bursztyn and Yang (2022) do not find that incentives correlate with the share of respondents holding misperceptions. Incorrect second-order beliefs are thus not necessarily the result of low effort from the part of the respondent. Moreover, Haaland et al. (2020) caution that financial incentives can have undesirable side-effects. Based on the previous literature, it is therefore not clear that financial incentives would have been desirable in this context - they may as well increase social desirability bias and experimenter demand effects.

A further drawback of informational experiments is that respondents may interpret the received information differently based on their personal experiences and background. I show 37
covariate balance in both survey rounds (table 1 and table 1 in the Online Appendix) and control for a large set of observable characteristics as well as baseline second-order beliefs to alleviate this concern. There are other _unobservable_ characteristics that may influence people’s reaction to the information, though: for instance, respondents may react less to the gifting information if they are already well informed. In some cases, the informational treatment would not provide any new information. I do not measure previous knowledge of gifting in baseline to avoid priming respondents who were allocated in control. I thus cannot control for it. Previous knowledge about gifing may bias treatment effect sizes downwards. A further concern is that respondents may react differently if they anticipate that a gender equal inheritance law will be passed soon. This is unlikely given the political context, though: the political consensus has shifted to the right and the incumbent president is strongly opposed to gender equality in inheritance (Verdier, 2020).

The survey mode imposed further restrictions on the data collection. I limited myself to quantifying the _occurrence_ of gifting and did not ask respondents to quantify the _value_ of the gifts they made or received. This is a major data limitation, yet, gaining reliable information on the value of gifts would have been difficult because of recall bias. Moreover, it would likely have increased the non-response bias as many respondents are uncomfortable disclosing information on personal wealth and financial transactions in an interview. Finally, it is beyond any doubt that adding a behavioral outcome would enhance this study. Considering the topic of research, this would require an extensive period of observation and data collection effort. Given current funding constraints, this is left to future research.

# **5 Conclusions**

Policymakers and researchers worldwide agree that gender discrimination represents a major obstacle to sustainable development: women represent more than half of a country’s population and limiting their ability to participate in politics, the economy and society is likely to harm not only the women themselves but society as a whole. Gender discrimination is particularly striking when encoded in national law. Yet, reforming gender discriminatory law can be difficult, and probably even more so when it is of religious origin (Htun et al., 2019). This study assesses public opinion regarding the gender discrimination among siblings which is implied by Islamic inheritance law. Sons are systematically favored over daughters. Most Muslim-majority countries worldwide continue to apply Islamic inheritance law. This 38
gender discrimination in inheritance law has been questioned by a large social movement in Tunisia since 2018 but the reform proposal has never reached a parliamentary vote.

This study asks whether gifting is a second-best private alternative to the reform of gender discriminatory inheritance law and whether its use can be encouraged by an informational intervention. To answer these research questions, I conducted a nationwide phone survey, reaching a sample of more than 1,500 Tunisian adults. The survey gathered extensive descriptive and correlational evidence on Tunisians’ attitudes regarding women’s right to inheritance, as well as their use of gifting. With an informational experiment which was embedded in the survey, I moreover tested whether gifting one’s daughter can be encouraged via an informational treatment.

Tunisia, probably the country with the strongest feminist tradition in North Africa, represents an ideal case study for this research. The legal status quo in Tunisia remains unchanged: a son receives twice the share of a daughter, as foreseen by the Qur’an. My study shows that the persistence of Islamic inheritance law in Tunisia is consistent with the preferences of the majority of citizens. The descriptive data I collect shows that only about one in three Tunisian adults favors the introduction of a gender equal inheritance law regime. However, legal reform does not constitute the only way of increasing women’s share in the final wealth allocation. The Tunisian civil code allows parents to make gifts to their daughter during their lifetime. By doing so, they can attenuate the gender discrimination among their children in the final wealth allocation. I find that public opinion towards gifting daughters is much more favorable than towards legal reform: two in three Tunisians state that they would be willing to use gifting to achieve a more gender equal inheritance allocation. The descriptive evidence offered by this study thus confirms that gifting is a widespread and socially accepted practice in Tunisia.

Does gifting one’s daughter represent a private alternative to the nationwide introduction of secular inheritance law? To some extent, yes. I conclude that gifting represents a way of attenuating the gender discrimination imposed by Islamic inheritance law but only families who are relatively well-off are fully able to exploit it. This is intuitive since gifting requires the existence of assets, such as property or land that can be written over to a child, and comes at a cost in terms of notary fees, but also in terms of effort, time and planning. The final decision regarding the within-family wealth allocation is likely to remain in the hands of the head of the household; in practice women are significantly less likely to make gifts than men. An informational intervention aiming to encourage gifting one’s daughters 39
would therefore a priori have to target fathers to be effective. However, my descriptive data shows that first, men tend to endorse more gender conservative norms than women and second, gifts to sons and male relatives are also quite common. These are worrisome findings if one considers the growing literature that shows that well-intended reforms and policy interventions may backfire in the presence of regressive gender norms (Rosenblum, 2015, Roy, 2015, Bhalotra et al., 2020). Hence, any potential policy intervention must be carefully designed and evaluated.

This study evaluates the impact of two informational treatments which aim to encourage the use of gifting to increase daughters’ share in the final bequest allocation. In T1, respondents receive information on the possibility to use gifting and the fiscal benefit associated with it. In T2, respondents are first informed about the level of public support for the introduction of a gender equal inheritance regime. They are told whether they under- or overestimated public support or whether they held correct beliefs and subsequently receive the same information on gifting as respondents in T1. The evidence on the effectiveness of these informational treatments to encourage gifting women is mixed. Respondents become significantly more likely to favor a gender equal bequest when administered T1. The effect is stronger among women and among individuals whose father has passed away, which is consistent with earlier literature suggesting that preferences are less malleable in the presence of older family members (Anukriti et al., 2020). T2 significantly decreases the likelihood of favoring a gender equal bequest and supporting reform among the group of respondents who hold correct beliefs. T2 tends to increase respondents’ willingness to use gifting to achieve a more gender equal inheritance allocation. I interpret this as suggestive evidence in favor of the hypothesis that gifting is perceived as a private substitute to legal reform.

This study also contributes to the larger discussion on the importance of social norms for development. I show that a majority of Tunisians underestimate their peers’ willingness to reform the law. At first sight, perceived social norms appear to be closely linked to individuals’ demand for gender equality in inheritance: respondents who underestimate their peers’ support for gender equal inheritance law are significantly more likely to endorse conservative gender norms. The “gender gap” in second-order beliefs is almost twice as large as the “gender gap” in first-order beliefs: both men and women overestimate the gender polarization around the question and they do so because they underestimate men’s openness to reform. But the direction of the causality is not clear. Do second-order beliefs shape firstorder beliefs or is it maybe the other way round? The bulk of previous literature suggests that individuals adapt their preferences to what is perceived to be the social norm (Bursztyn 40
et al., 2019, Bursztyn et al., 2020, Gulzar et al., 2020). However, it is plausible that the causality also runs the opposite way: individual perceptions of what the social norm is may be driven by own preferences. Indeed, my analysis of the treatment effect heterogeneity by prior perceptions shows that individuals who misperceive public reform support only weakly respond to the belief correction. I argue that this could be due to the fact that respondents who underestimate public support tend to hold relatively firm political opinions, which may make their preferences less malleable to an informational treatment. Similar results have been found in the US context where political opinions are strongly polarized with respect to issues of redistribution (Alesina et al., 2018b, Alesina et al., 2018c, Settele, 2022, Haaland and Roth, 2023). Considering the experimental evidence on treatment effect heterogeneity by prior misperceptions, I conclude that, even though Tunisians underestimate public support for inheritance law reform, this misperception is unlikely to be a binding constraint on the country’s ability to reform the law.

As social norms continue to evolve and younger generations reach voting age, the issues of gender discriminatory inheritance law and bequest practices will become even more pressing in Tunisia and the larger MENA region. A potential avenue for future research would be to vary the treatment: analysis of second-order beliefs shows that the misperception stems from respondents underestimating men’s reform support. Given the context, it is possible that the belief correction treatment would be stronger if it directly referred to _male_ support for introducing gender equal inheritance law, rather than aggregated support by both genders. But gifting is unlikely to be a viable alternative to legal reform in the long run given that its use is largely restricted to wealthy families. Future research should therefore investigate alternative ways of raising awareness about women’s rights and strengthening women’s access to property in the region.

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