Shifting the Balance: Examining the Impact of Local Labor Market Opportunities on Female Household Bargaining Power in India

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in studying the effect of female labor market outcomes on intrahousehold bargaining. This paper examines the effects of local labor market opportunities in India on a variety of female bargaining characteristics, including domestic violence and intrahousehold discussion of important issues. Specifically, I utilize district-level data on employment in various occupations to calculate an employment shift-share index that proxies gender-specific labor demand. I find that improvements in labor market conditions for women lead to a decrease in perceptions of domestic violence, whereas improvements in predicted demand for male employment have little or negative effects on women’s household bargaining power. When disaggregated by indicators of initial bargaining power, women that have lower levels of initial bargaining power either see no effect on bargaining or experience a backlash effect.

Keywords:

• Bargaining
• domestic violence
• female labor force participation
• India
• shift-share

JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• O12
• J12
• J16

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Professors David Cuberes, Magda Tsaneva, Wayne Gray, Junfu Zhang, and Marc Rockmore for their wonderful feedback. I am thankful for the comments and feedback provided by seminar participants at Clark University and conference participants at the Southern Economic Association conferences. The findings, interpretations, conclusions, and errors are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The study uses open access data from the India Human Development Survey and from the National Sample Survey, which are freely downloaded from the following links: https://ihds.umd.edu/data-download and http://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/EUE. Replication codes are available upon request.

Notes

1 While domestic violence can be used by women towards their husbands, in the context of India, domestic violence is committed almost universally by men (Mahapatro, Gupta, & Gupta, 2012).

2 Dowry is money, land, or other goods of value paid by the bride’s family to the groom and his family. Typically dowry is paid at the time of marriage, but often, as the price is not a written contract, the groom and his family may use violence to extract a larger payment from the bride’s family (Calvi & Keskar, 2021).

3 While currently married women make up the main sample, I also use ever-married women, including those individuals who have been divorced or separated, to test the probability of divorce.

4 Divorced and separated women also answer the bargaining and domestic violence questions. Including them ensures the same sample is used when investigating the causality and divorce mechanism.

5 The DVI is also regressed with female and male employment rates, women’s absolute wage, and women’s relative wage.

6 Descriptive statistics for this are included in Panel A of Table A1. The average female ratio is about 47.5 per cent, the average district nominal income doubled over the period, and average district literacy is about 69 per cent.

7 See Aizer (2010), Farmer and Tiefenthaler (1997), and Pollak (2019).

8 The sex ratio is typically defined as the number of females to males. In some states in India, this has been measured to be very low due to a combination of both female feticide and infanticide. Thus, a community with a particularly low sex ratio would be due to more conservative gender attitudes leading to what Amartya Sen called ‘missing women’.