Women's Inheritance Rights and Bargaining Power: Evidence from Kenya

This paper investigates the human capital effects of a statutory law reform meant to grant Kenyan women equal inheritance rights. I employ a difference-in-differences strategy, exploiting variation in pre-reform inheritance rights across religious groups. I find that a variety of human capital outcomes are affected: women exposed to the reform are more educated, both in absolute terms and relative to males; they are less likely to undergo genital mutilation and more likely to be medically assisted during childbirth; they tend to delay marriage and childbearing, and to have better marriage market outcomes. I provide robustness checks by showing that these improvements occur across ethnic groups, regardless of initial education level, and are more pronounced for women with fewer siblings, for whom the absolute inheritance share is potentially larger. These findings suggest that legal recognition of women's inheritance rights can have an impact on women's empowerment even in a context of poor enforcement and in spite of the persistence of deep-rooted social norms