Family Planning and Children’s Human Capital: Experimental Evidence from Urban Malawi

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

We conduct a randomized controlled trial that provides 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 over two years. We study the effects of our intervention on child growth and development outcomes among 1,034 children born to participating women directly before intervention rollout. We find that children born to mothers assigned to the intervention arm were 0.28-0.34 standard deviations taller for their age and were 10.7-12.0 percentage points less likely to be stunted within a year of exposure to the family planning intervention. Children born to mothers assigned to the intervention arm also scored 0.19-0.23 standard deviations higher on a caregiver-reported measure of cognitive development after two years of intervention exposure. Non-measurement of children poses challenges throughout our study, and we show that our estimates are robust to multiple methods of correcting for potential attrition bias. These results are consistent with models of fertility that link couples’ fertility decisions to child health and human capital decisions. Our results also suggest that improved access to family planning may have positive downstream effects on child health beyond contraceptive use and fertility outcomes.

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 Presented in Session 77. Reproductive Health and Family Planning