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While many studies explored impacts of political quotas for females, often with ambiguous results, underlying mechanisms and long-term effects have received relatively little attention. Nation-wide data from India spanning a 15-year period allow us to explore how reservations affect leader qualifications, service delivery, political participation, local accountability, and individuals' willingness to contribute to public goods. Although leader quality declines and impacts on service quality are ambiguous, gender quotas are shown to increase political processes and participation, the willingness to contribute to public goods, and perceived ability to hold leaders to account. Key effects persist beyond the reserved period and impacts on females often materialize only with a lag.

This paper uses a large national household panel from 1999/2000 and 2007/08 to analyze the short-term effects of India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme on wages, labor supply, agricultural labor use, and productivity. The scheme prompted a 10-point wage increase and higher labor supply to nonagricultural casual work and agricultural self-employment. Program-induced drops in hired labor demand were more than outweighed by more intensive use of family labor, machinery, fertilizer, and diversification to crops with higher risk-return profiles, especially by small farmers. Although the aggregate productivity effects were modest, total employment generated by the program (but not employment in irrigation-related activities) significantly increased productivity, suggesting alleviation of liquidity constraints and implicit insurance provision rather than quality of works undertaken as a main channel for program-induced productivity effects.

While studies have explored the impacts of political quotas for females at household level, differential effects on males and females and their evolution through time have received little attention. Using nationwide data from India spanning a 15-year period, we find that, while leader quality declines, gender quotas increase the level and quality of women's political participation, their ability to hold leaders to account, and their willingness to contribute to public goods. Key effects persist beyond the reserved period and impacts on females often materialize only with a lag.

This paper uses evidence from three Indian states, one of which amended inheritance legislation in 1994, to assess first- and second-generation effects of inheritance reform using a triple-difference strategy. Second-generation effects on education, time use, and health are larger and more significant than first-generation effects even controlling for mothers' endowments. Improved access to bank accounts and sanitation as well as lower fertility in the parent generation suggest that inheritance reform empowered females in a sustainable way, a notion supported by significantly higher female survival rates.

This volume, which combines the experience of local governance in different countries, a qualitative study of local governance in action in one region of India, and a unique forty-year national panel study of rural India, provides a sober assessment of both the remarkable achievements of India's experiment with the Panchayati Raj and the ways in which this experiment has fallen short of its promise. It is essential reading not only for those looking for ways to make rural governance work better but also for academic social scientists looking for fresh ideas about how to model and analyze the process of rural governance.

Despite income growth, fertility decline, and educational expansion, women's labor force participation in rural India dropped precipitously over the last decade. This paper uses nationwide, individual-level data allow to explore whether random reservation of village leadership for women affected their access to suitable job opportunities, demand for participation in the labor force, and income as well as intrahousehold bargaining in the short and medium term. Political empowerment through reservation affected women's but not men's participation in public works, but also women's participation in labor markets, income, and participation in key household decisions, with a lag.