Family Planning and Women’s Labor Supply: Experimental Evidence from Urban Malawi

Mahesh Karra , Boston University
Daniel Maggio, Cornell University
David Canning, Harvard University

We conducted a randomized controlled trial that provided pregnant and immediate postpartum women with improved access to family planning through counseling, free transport to a clinic, and financial reimbursement for family planning services. We assess the causal impact of our intervention on women’s labor market outcomes and find that women are 5.2 percentage points more likely to be employed after two years of intervention exposure, which is driven by a 3.38 percentage point increase in women’s participation in wage-earning labor. The intervention resulted in a higher proportion of women reporting that they earn labor income, although we do not find evidence of increases in income levels among women who report earnings. Among women’s husbands, we find evidence of substitution away from self-enterprise and towards wage-earning labor but no evidence of changes in overall labor force participation, implying that the overall household labor supply increased as a result of our intervention. Our results suggest that the positive effects of improved access to family planning extend beyond fertility and health to women’s labor supply.

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 Presented in Session 90. Socio-economic Inequalities and Impacts