Do Cash Transfers Promoting Early Childhood Development Have Unintended Consequences on Fertility?; Imran Rasul (UCL)

Abstract

There has been a stark rise in direct cash transfer programs to the poor, and in policy interest in interventions targeting outcomes in early childhood. We draw these trends together to study whether interventions offering cash transfers to pregnant mothers to promote early childhood development, unintentionally induce those not pregnant to bring forward birth timing in order to become eligible for the receipt of such transfers. We do so in the context of rural Northern Nigeria, where the majority of households reside in extreme poverty, are credit constrained and food insecure, and frequently experience aggregate shocks. Contraceptives are unavailable and men largely drive fertility choices, yet the costs of bringing forward birth timing mostly operate through worse maternal and child health. We present evidence from a randomized control trial evaluating an intervention offering high-valued and long-lasting unconditional cash transfers to pregnant mothers. We examine how this impacted fertility dynamics among 1700 households in which women were not pregnant at baseline, tracked over four years from the intervention initiation. We document precise null impacts on the timing of births, total births and composition of households becoming pregnant over our study period. The reason is a combination of three factors: (i) women retain full control over the use of additional resources they bring into their household; (ii) women have available productive investment opportunities in their own businesses; (iii) they choose to transfer few resources to husbands. Hence ultimately men have weak private incentives to alter birth timing. Based on this constellation of factors, we use DHS surveys to classify low-income countries into those that are more or less likely to see fertility consequences when cash transfers for early childhood development are targeted to pregnant mothers.

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