Essays on gender inequalities and poverty measurement with application to India

This PhD dissertation contributes to the literature on household economics and the measurement of poverty & sex-selective abortion. When social norms and preferences favour males over females, outcomes can reflect gender inequalities across various dimensions. I study the norm of patrilocality in the first chapter and ask how the household structure of four adult members affects the daughter-in-law's decision-making-say and autonomy outcomes. I find that the status of the daughter-in-law improves after death as power is redistributed among the members. However, the findings are not consistent with the conventional channel of the mother-in-law being the sole and strongest authority over the daughter-in-law. The second chapter studies the measurement of female sex-selective abortion and asks if there are repeated abortions between two consecutive births. As this question cannot be answered using existing methods, the paper proposes novel tests and methodology to estimate the fractions of the populations undergoing sex-selective abortions. Applying our methods to Indian data we find first quantitative evidence of repeated abortions. The third chapter proposes a new approach of absolute income poverty measurement that takes preference into account when agents differ in preferences and face different prices. This is done in two ways, first by suggesting a way to use individualised reference prices, and second by defining group/region specific poverty lines.(FILO - Philosophie) -- UCL, 201