It is reasonable to think that the economic empowerment of Indian women might have a positive impact on their mental health. This is because greater access to resources and property can attenuate financial stress and vulnerability, while stronger bargaining power can enhance women’s voice and social standing within the household. These sort of changes may foster greater self-esteem, independence, and life satisfaction, while reducing feelings of insecurity and psychological distress. However, if this kind of thinking is to form the basis for policy, then we need credible evidence demonstrating the nexus between economic empowerment and improved mental health.
A thought-provoking new study by Ajinkya Keskar and Sulagna Mookerjee examines whether policies that strengthen women’s economic rights can produce long-term improvements in mental health or psychological well-being. These researchers focus on India’s Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA), a set of state-level legal reforms that expanded daughters’ rights to inherit ancestral property. Using differences in the timing and geographic implementation of these reforms, combined with nationally representative survey data on older Indians, this study finds that women exposed to stronger inheritance rights experienced substantially better mental health decades later. Therefore, this study makes a salient contribution to research connecting economic empowerment, intrahousehold bargaining power, and mental health.
The motivation for the study is the substantial prevalence and economic cost of mental illness in low- and middle-income countries. Depression is particularly common among women and older populations, while access to mental-health treatment is limited. Although previous research has established that factors such as poverty can adversely affect psychological well-being, evidence on whether economic empowerment policies improve mental health remains limited. This study builds on a literature showing that cash transfers, livelihood programmes, stronger property rights, and other interventions can improve women’s economic position. The main question here is whether these sort of improvements also have consequences for mental health that persist over the long term.
The HSAA provides a particularly useful setting because its implementation has varied across states and over time. Under the original 1956 Hindu Succession Act, sons—but not daughters—were members of the Hindu coparcenary and thus possessed birthrights to ancestral joint-family property. Between 1976 and 1994, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Karnataka amended the law to give daughters comparable rights; Kerala adopted a somewhat different reform by abolishing the joint-family property system. The reform was subsequently implemented nationally in 2005. This study concentrates mainly on individuals married between 1970 and 2005, thereby exploiting the pre-2005 variation in legal exposure.
The empirical analysis uses Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), which surveyed adults aged 45 and older in 2017–18. The final sample contains 51,020 individuals—28,479 women and 22,541 men—from 31,575 households. Mental health is measured through an eight-item version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The study classifies respondents as exhibiting depressive symptoms when their score reaches at least eight. The researchers also constructed a broader mental-health index and a separate life-satisfaction index.Among women belonging to HSAA-eligible religions—Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain—the study compares those in reform states who married after the reform with comparable women who married before the reform and with women in states that had not yet adopted the reform. State-of-birth and state-of-residence definitions of treatment are both used. Importantly, women belonging to religions to which the HSAA did not apply provide a so-called falsification group.
The basic finding is a sizable improvement in women’s psychological well-being. Using state of birth to define exposure, HSAA exposure reduces the probability of depressive symptoms by 5.9 percentage points, an 18.3% reduction relative to the control mean. The mental-health index improves by approximately 0.081 standard deviations. Defining treatment using state of residence produces very similar results: depressive symptoms fall by 6.4 percentage points, while the mental-health index improves by 0.086 standard deviations. Life satisfaction also rises by approximately 0.25 standard deviations. There are no comparable effects among women from religious groups excluded from the HSAA, suggesting that the findings are not simply reflecting broader changes in reform states.
This study also investigates how inheritance rights may improve mental health. Two mechanisms receive particular attention. First is economic empowerment. HSAA-exposed households are 4.2 percentage points more likely to own land, representing about a 9% increase relative to the control mean. Although the LASI data cannot establish that the land was specifically inherited by the wife, this result is consistent with earlier evidence that the HSAA increased women’s inheritance and transfers from natal families.
The second mechanism is social empowerment and autonomy. The researchers constructed an autonomy index measuring women’s participation in household decisions involving children’s marriage, property transactions, gifts, education, and social or religious events. HSAA exposure significantly increases women’s autonomy. Interestingly, autonomy also increases among men, suggesting that stronger female bargaining power may alter household relationships in ways that benefit both spouses.
Overall, this study persuasively contends that the consequences of women’s empowerment extend well beyond income, assets, or bargaining power. A legal reform that strengthens women’s economic rights generates psychological benefits that persist for more than two decades. Therefore, from a policy perspective, it is important to comprehend that there exists a long-run link between legal economic empowerment and mental health, quite apart from any short-term effects of income transfers or psychological interventions. More generally, these findings have additional implications: policies promoting women’s property rights and autonomy may simultaneously advance economic security, gender equality, and the mental-health objectives embodied in Sustainable Development Goal 3.4.
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