This paper considers arguments about Islam and women's welfare, and, at greater length, how legal systems with Islamic elements treat women, with a focus on how women fare in Islamic family courts. Key methodological issues include how to focus on real-world views and practices rather than only...

This paper examines the impact of gender based violence against women and girls (GBV), in the environment the children live in, on school attendance, school achievement, as well as boys' and girls' dropouts. Based on the sixth phase of the Demographic and Health Surveys from 18 sub-Saharan...

I present a model of intra-household allocation to show that when income is not perfectly observed by both spouses, hiding of income can occur even when revelation increases bargaining power. I draw data from Ghana and exploit the variation in the degree of asymmetric information between...

I explore the long-term effects of internal displacement caused by the Kurdish-Turkish conflict on women's attitudes towards domestic violence. Using the Turkish Demographic and Health Survey, I show that forced migrants are more likely to view domestic violence as acceptable. As suggestive...

Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in parts of the developing world. Estimates suggest that more than 200 million women are demographically 'missing' worldwide. To explain the global 'missing women' phenomenon, research has mainly focused on excess female...

In this paper, we explore the links between polygyny and female labour supply in Senegal using a nationally representative survey. In a reduced-form approach, we first measure the impact of polygyny on participation using a joint model of spouse participation. The identification of the impact of...

This paper investigates if residing in a joint family affects non-farm employment for married women in rural India. Our estimates based on a longitudinal survey of over 27000 women conducted in 2005 and 2012, and using the conditional logistic regression and instrumental variable approach...

Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

We examine the impacts of an unconditional cash transfer in Lesotho using an experimental impact evaluation design. We find that the cash transfer led to different outcomes for girls and boys, overall favouring secondary school-aged girls. Girls in this age group were less likely to miss school,...

This paper attempts to measure the extent of inequality within households and its contribution to overall levels of inequality in child well-being. The paper analyses the distribution of resources (outcomes) between girls and boys for four indicators: nutrition, birth registration, school...