Between 1986 and 1994, four Indian states amended the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, equalizing daughters' rights to inherit parents' ancestral land on par with sons'. These reforms intended to bring about greater gender equity. This dissertation examines whether reforms were successful in improving gender equity in terms of several outcomes: land inheritance, sex selection, and local accountability. Methodologically, the dissertation's three papers combine analysis of survey data for 8,569 households with qualitative interviews of over 600 individuals.;Paper one identifies legal reform's heterogeneous ability to alter a key dimension of gender equality: women's land inheritance. By exploiting temporal variation in legal implementation, it finds legal reform yields significant positive results under two conditions: (1) the presence of exogenously-determined "reservations" for elected female Pradhans (village heads); and (2) perceptions of local officials' high accountability to women's priorities. In contrast, reform increases inequality where individuals perceive officials as highly accountable to men, permitting Coasean re-engineering of enforcement to bolster traditional institutions.;Paper two proposes a model of reform's unintended consequences for the sex ratio: reform makes daughters relatively more expensive---and hence less desired---than sons because norms dictate that any investments in daughters "leak out" of the natal family upon daughters' marriage. Using well-identified samples of survey data, the paper finds that the sex ratio of daughters-to-sons decreased for Indian women who became eligible for equal land inheritance. Analysis shows daughters' costs increase because exposure to reform: (1) reduces sons' willingness to care for elder parents, who can no longer guarantee sons' traditional inheritance rights, and (2) increases dowries paid upon daughters' marriage, to substitute dowry for inheritance rights.;Paper three examines the roots of variation in perceptions of local officials' accountability. Accountability, measured as citizens' perceived ability to demand realization of their legal rights from local officials, varies significantly across India based on social status as well as local institutions---electoral, educational, and labor market---and historical land tenure institutions. Overall, this dissertation advances our understanding of legal and broader institutional reforms' impact on gender equality, as a crucial component of economic and political development.
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