 Good morning everyone. Buenos dias. Welcome to the first parallel session on day three of this conference. Today our session is on gender. That's the broad title of the session. So we have a couple of papers looking at gender and labor markets in the informal sector and in entrepreneurship and gender and property rights. We are supposed to have four presenters but we currently have only three so we will get started and if our fourth presenter joins us well and good. I'm the chair of the session. I'm Hema and as chair I'm starting off, I'm also a presenter so I'm starting off my presentation. This is the presentation is titled Women's Legal Rights, Gender Gaps and Property Ownership in Developing Countries. Co-authored with Isis Gadis from the World Bank and Rahul Lahoti from UNU wider. Rahul is here but Isis hasn't been able to join us. So really we are looking here at why what women's property rights are all about and and looking at gender gaps in property ownership. So the motivation really is why are we looking at assets because typically we talk about income and consumption but if you're thinking in terms of poverty and inequality assets are really very important and they are often a neglected aspect of looking at economic resources and assets can really make a difference between structural poverty and transient poverty. Wealth inequality typically tends to be higher because assets represent an accumulation of economic resources over the lifetime and they can also generate status and social advantage in this conference. We've heard a lot about inequalities of opportunity, intergenerational mobility, much more than income. It's also assets that really contributes to these kinds of inequalities. And if you're thinking of assets and women, I mean that was just broadly about why assets are important but assets and women, I think first is really the intrinsic social justice of it all that every individual should have equal opportunity to own assets. Whether you actually do or not is another question but you should not be denied that opportunity due to discrimination of any kind. And then there is that instrumental evidence that policymakers really like to hear that you empower women and that then you empower communities and families. Assets also sort of fall into the instrumental argument and you have some evidence from the intra-household literature but as Raquel yesterday was pointing out, some of this evidence is mixed when you look at certain outcomes particularly in relation to IPV, right, intimate partner violence. There is backlash, a tendency, so the evidence in this is mixed but overall it does seem to benefit via the mechanisms really being increased agency, negotiation and bargaining power for children as well. And then there's also a lot of research mainly coming from sub Saharan Africa that talks about land ownership and women's names and how that is very helpful. If you don't have land ownership that can hinder adoption of certain kinds of technology or in terms of labor allocation etc. And in terms of evidence, we don't have a lot of good data on individual level property ownership. I mean leave alone assets which you could say property and lots of other kinds of facets but even at immovable property which is really if you're looking at land, housing, real estate that's really the big thing that contributes to the portfolio, financial portfolio in a lot of for a lot of people and we don't have good data on it because we usually household survey data and we are thinking developing countries, you walk in and you say does this household own a plot of land, does this household own a house and yes and then you sort of move on you're not asking who within this household is owning right because but this household is just another entity, the household is not a legal entity for ownership of assets. So we really suffer from a good data in this context. There is some that is now beginning to be available, you have LSMS plus but that's sub Saharan focused, largely agricultural data, then you have I think other state representative or national representative data that's coming up now but it's still a very nascent field. So what we've worked with is a demographic and health surveys which since 2010 has started asking a question in the men's and women's questionnaire if you're familiar with the structure of DHS is that they have a household questionnaire and then a men's questionnaire and a women's questionnaire and now they have started asking do you own either jointly or by yourself a piece of land and do you own this house or any other house? It's not the best way to ask these questions and it's kind of restrictive but it's a beginning and DHS is good because it's a very reliable consistent survey, it happens year on year or with some frequency but there is, you can now start thinking about tracking and seeing if you're making progress with respect to women's asset ownership. So this is the way the question is worded, do you own this or any house either alone or jointly with someone else? Right and then you have these various coding categories and the similar question is asked for land and it's asked in the individual questionnaire so it's asked to men and women separately. So for our analysis we've actually looked at married couples and I'll get to a little more description of our analytical sample later but we've looked at married couples because we've also wanted to focus on property differences at an intra household level. So the two main questions here is first paint a descriptive picture of property ownership. We don't know at a global scale, it's for 41 countries and then look, assess the factors we are interested in the legal regimes, like ability to own property, what are the laws that allow or that constrain or inhibit women's property ownership. So looking at it from a correlational factor, right? So what are the factors that are correlated with women's property ownership? Focusing mainly on the role of legal system. So the main three takeaways that we have are gender gaps are widespread and systematic. It's not very surprising to people who work in this field but it's very good to back up these statements with evidence at a cross-country level and within countries the gender gaps are most pronounced in rural areas and for groups who are in the poorest quintiles and countries with more gender egalitarian legal regimes have higher levels of property ownership by women especially for housing ownership. So why are we focusing on women's legal rights? So if you think of the main pathways through which women actually acquire, people acquire not just women but both men and women acquire property. It's through inheritance. It's through your ability to purchase in the market or it's through marriage, right? I'm abstracting away from land reforms that are done by the state or transfers that are done by the state because we don't have very good data on those but so we are looking at market transactions so your ability to actually be employed, have good earnings and then purchase in the market, your ability to inherit from either your spouse or through natal property and then your ability to accumulate through marriage, right? Which actually turns out to be a very important channel for women. So I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes why marriage is so important. So we have what is called this concept of marital regimes. So you have a full community of property which says that once you form a union, either registered or if you're cohabiting legally, then all the assets that you bring to the marriage and any assets that you accumulate in the marriage from that point onwards is recognized as joint marital property. So it belongs to both partners equally. And then you have what is called a partial community of property which says what you bring into the marriage remains yours, is independent but what you accumulate together as a unit is considered marital property and then what you have is called a complete separation of property where what you bring in and what you accumulate both remain independent. So in terms there is no concept of community. So there is no concept of marital assets. So suppose me and my partner we buy a house together but it happens to be registered in my name then my partner doesn't have actually any rights over it even though he may have contributed either monetarily or in other kinds. So this is why it becomes very important when we are thinking of marital regimes. So this is just some descriptive data from the WBL which is the Women Business and Law Database of the World Bank which actually codes these marital regimes of the various countries. So if you see there is what is called legal recognition of non-monetary contributions to marital property. So what this says is that the law in some way recognizes that the woman has had a contribution to marital property either in terms of being a homemaker or contributions in kind or there is full or partial community of property in these countries. So the countries in yellow are those that don't have it that are you would see mainly sort of northern Africa, some parts of Sub-Taharan and parts of Mena and South Asia. Protection from discrimination and pay. So if you are guaranteed law mandates equal remuneration of women and men for work of equal value. So here you see that there is more widespread discrimination than in the previous and then inheritance rights of children. This says can daughters and sons inherit equally from their parents if there is any discrimination on that front. Again it's kind of limited to certain countries just in North Africa and some of the Mena regions and then inheritance rights of spouses. Inheritance rights of spouses means can a man inherit his wife's estate in the same way as a woman inherit the man's estate. And we might think that some of these are largely equal etc but if you start looking at the data very closely even the law doesn't allow for it. I mean it's one thing to say that the law allows but there is ineffective implementation but it's another thing to say that even the law is discriminatory in some aspects. So this was just sort of very descriptive data and then to quickly go on to our key results is that in almost all countries women are less likely to own properties and men. Here what we've done is we've have 41 countries you'll see most of the representation is actually from sub-Saharan Africa. It's a few countries from the other regions of the world. This graph is probably kind of hard to read but I think the main takeaway is that there is significant geographic variation across countries but largely except with the exception of Cameroon and we haven't figured out why the gender gaps are really favoring men. And then again descriptively we've just plotted the difference between rural and urban areas in terms of property, soul and joint ownership of property, of land. We've combined land and housing for married couples in rural versus urban areas and you find that rural areas are slightly more disadvantaged in terms of greater incidence that the gap is greater in rural areas. And this is not always because that women in urban areas are owning more. It's also because men in urban areas are actually owning less. So here we are looking at the absolute gap so the incidence is lower for both men and women. And then we actually run some multivariate regression models. What we are really interested in is in looking at these legal regimes. So we have, maybe I should just tell you what these variables that we have to capture the legal regimes are, is that men and women have equal ownership rights to immovable property. Then the law provides for valuation of non-monetary contributions. So that really encompasses the marital regimes aspect of it. And then male and females have equal inheritance rights because there was very little variation between inheritance from natal and true spouses. We've combined that as one. Law mandates equal remuneration for equal work and a woman can get a, get a job in the same way as a man, right? So these broadly reflect the pathways that I've talked about earlier. We run three models where we first start off with only our legal variables and then we successively add controls, controls for social and cultural realms. If you were there for the key keynote by Raquel yesterday, she talks about dowry, she talks about bride price, matrilocality, patrilocality. So those are actually some of the controls that we have in these variables. We've got the data from the ethnographic Atlas and then controls at the individual spouse and couple household level. So I guess in interests of parsimony, I'm just going to briefly summarize. This is the first three models by urban and rural areas. And you'll find that in urban, three out of five legal variables are positively and significantly associated with women's chances of owning a house. This is for housing ownership and raising. So by between 10 to 24 percentage points each. And in rural areas equal ownership rights. Again, it's really the law that's kicking in is that men and women have equal ownership rights to removable property. So what this says, this legal regime is really about is the fact that men and women can own property equally. There is no discrimination and they have the right to administer the property without any discrimination based on sex. Often when a woman gets married, the husband, she might own it, but the administration and the maintenance of that property rights passes on to the husband. Then that would be discriminatory. So really this seems to be very important. And in urban areas, this law that's looking at non-monetary contributions becomes, is picking up of great importance here. You have law mandating equal remuneration for equal work. Again, picking up in urban areas, but not so much in rural areas. And this is not necessarily very surprising because all of these laws really apply to the formal sector. And if you're thinking developing countries, the formal sector does not employ most of the people. Women in particular are largely employed in the informal sector. So, and the formal sector tends to be concentrated in urban areas. This is land ownership. We've done this separately again for housing and land, land ownership, urban and rural. The associations are somewhat similar, but weaker, still significant, but the level of significance goes down. I think I barely have a minute left. So just quickly, what we have also done is those were individual variables, but what the WDBL also provides is summary measures. So when you say set of laws under assets, they have, I think, five indicators and that go from zero to 100. And then they have workplace, there are four indicators, pay and entrepreneurship, four indicators each. And then it's like a summary measure. So this in some ways is like a robustness check for us to see if it spans out. Largely, I think our results seem to hold. So broadly, the policy implications conclusions are that there is state sanctioned discrimination, right? In the property rights market, in the credit market, in the labor market and labor market when you're thinking of employment and remuneration, and that these really are limiting women's employment opportunities and their opportunities to acquire assets and wealth. We need more egalitarian legal regimes. And we don't see inheritance kicking in so strongly, but that's probably a limitation of our sample. And I'm happy to discuss it in the Q&A. And we've controlled, as usual, the caveats we've controlled for a lot, but there could be some omitted variables that might be affecting some of our results, right? An argument for a continued push for reforms in the legal area and better implementation of the laws that already exist. Stop here. Thank you.