Gendered Aid and Women’s Rights

We study the role of development cooperation in improving women’s economic rights in non-OECD countries and assess whether development aid given for gender equality objectives leads to progress in women’s legal rights in recipient countries. We use a sample of over 100 recipient countries observed from 1990 to 2019 annually and two different identification methods. First, we estimate a two-way panel fixed effects model augmented with a recipient-specific temporal unobserved heterogeneity term, and, second, we use a quasi-experimental shift-share design to identify the local average treatment effect of gendered aid on changes in women’s rights. Our findings show that gender-focused aid has a positive impact on the de-jure economic empowerment of women in recipient countries. We observe larger effects on reforms for women's economic empowerment when aid is provided specifically for women’s rights projects