IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dia/wpaper/dt202501.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

She Works Hard for the Money: Debt Burden and Labour Supply in India

Author

Listed:
  • Arnaud Natal

    (BSE (University of Bordeaux, CNRS, and INRAE), French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP))

  • Christophe Jalil Nordman

    (IRD, LEDa-DIAL (IRD, CNRS, and PSL Research University), France, IFP (Pondicherry, India))

Abstract

For over 40 years, labour supply has been at the heart of empirical microeconomics, but few studies have examined the impact of household debt burdens on labour supply, and almost none on countries of the Global South. This research fills this gap by examining how debt burden - measured by the debt service ratio - affects labour supply, in particular hours worked, among more than 3200 individuals in rural Tamil Nadu, India, between 2016-17 and 2020-21. Using a Heckman correction with lagged debt ratios and fixed effects to account for unobserved factors and limit reverse causality, the study highlights a striking result: women increase their labour supply to repay household debt, regardless of which household member incurred it. Our results challenge the commonly held view in the South that women’s work is synonymous with empowerment, suggesting that it may be the result of economic pressures rather than a move towards autonomy.

Suggested Citation

  • Arnaud Natal & Christophe Jalil Nordman, 2025. "She Works Hard for the Money: Debt Burden and Labour Supply in India," Working Papers DT/2025/01, DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation).
    • Handle: RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt202501
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dial.ird.fr/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-01-SheWorksHard2025.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2025
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Caste; gender; empowerment; labour supply; microcredit;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt202501. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Loic Le Pezennec (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diallfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.