Women's empowerment and family health

Abstract

We study the causal effect of women's empowerment on family health in India. We define treatment as a woman having primary control over household resources and use changes in inheritance laws as an instrument. Due to measurement difficulties and sharing of goods, treatment cannot be directly observed and must be estimated using a structural model. Treatment mismeasurement may therefore arise from model misspecification and estimation errors. We provide a new estimation method, MR-LATE, that can consistently estimate local average treatment effects when treatment is mismeasured. We find that women's control of substantial household resources improves their and their children's health.