2025 Theses Doctoral

Institutions, Recognition, and Gender: Essays on Development Economics

Vardani, Akanksha

The dissertation examines the intersection of institutional structures, social norms, and gender dynamics in developing economies through three interconnected studies. The central theme binding these papers is how formal policies and institutions intended to promote gender equality and development are mediated by social contexts, cultural beliefs, and interpersonal dynamics. Each study reveals that the effectiveness of formal interventions—whether property rights, tax enforcement, or educational access—depends critically on the underlying social structures and belief systems in which they operate.

In the first chapter, I investigate how awareness and recognition of women’s property rights affects household dynamics. Through a field experiment in rural Maharashtra, India, I find that merely documenting women’s ownership is insufficient—both spouses must recognize these rights for empowerment to occur. My intervention, which provided households with information about women’s co-ownership status and physical documentation, increased expenditure on women-specific goods by 40% and reduced men’s alcohol consumption by 33%. Effects varied significantly based on pre-existing knowledge: households with lowest initial awareness showed the strongest consumption effects, while reductions in domestic violence occurred specifically in households where wives knew about their rights but husbands did not. These findings demonstrate that changing beliefs about women’s rights is crucial for realizing the benefits of formal property ownership.

The second chapter examines how social connections to elected officials affect property tax compliance in rural India. Using a close election difference-in-discontinuities design and administrative tax data, my co-author and I find that citizens connected to local elected leaders are 20 percentage points more likely to remit taxes and remit more in tax payments. This effect is partially driven by enforcement—connected citizens face more in fines and are 32.5 percentage points more likely to be penalized. Heterogeneity analysis reveals these effects are concentrated among poorer property owners with connections to officials, suggesting that political connections can sometimes work against traditional clientelistic expectations.

In the third chapter, we investigate how educational investment in women is influenced by labor market returns. Analyzing data from India and Zambia, we test whether expanded access to secondary education produces patterns consistent with human capital accumulation or signaling theories. We find evidence of uniform increases in educational attainment, particularly in India, suggesting human capital accumulation may be the dominant mechanism. Together, these papers demonstrate that effective policy interventions must account for the complex interplay between formal institutions and informal social structures to achieve meaningful progress in gender equality and economic development.