Customary Norms, Inheritance, and Human Capital

We study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. We exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups could inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform received 0.9 less years of education—an effect dr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAmerican economic journal. Applied economics
Main Authors La Ferrera, Eliana, Milazzo, Annamaria
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published American Economic Association 01.10.2017
Subjects
CULTURAL NORMS
EDUCATION
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
GENDER
HUMAN CAPITAL
LAND ALLOCATION
LAND INHERITANCE
PROPERTY RIGHTS
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Summary:We study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. We exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups could inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform received 0.9 less years of education—an effect driven by landed households, for whom the reform was binding. We find no effect for girls, whose inheritance was de facto unaffected. These patterns suggest that before the reform matrilineal groups invested more in education than they would if unconstrained, to substitute for land inheritance, underscoring the importance of cultural norms.
ISSN:1945-7782