WOMEN EMPOWERMENT & CHILD HEALTH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

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The goal of the proposed research project is to examine the effect of women's empowerment on child health. It is widely believed that improving the situation of women relative to men is would be an efficient way to improve child health. Yet, there is surprisingly little convincing empirical evidence on the causal effect of women's empowerment on child health. I plan to estimate how policies designed to improve women's access to education, earnings, and political participation affect child health. More specifically, the project has three aims: 1. To estimate the effect of increasing the education of women on their fertility and children's health, and to compare this effect to the effect of increasing the education of men. Does the correlation between women's education and child health really uncover the effect of education per se, or rather the effect of some unobserved family or community characteristics? I will answer this by examining how increases in women's education due to a major school construction program in Indonesia affects the health of their children. 2. To determine whether women's short term income fluctuations have a different effect on child health than men's short term income fluctuations. I will provide evidence on this question by taking advantage of gender segregation in crop growing in Cote d'Ivoire. Using panel data in combination with rainfall data, I will examine whether child health and nutrition is more adversely affected when it is the women's crop that fails than when it is the man's crop. 3. To estimate the effect of women's political participation on the provision of public goods conducive to child health. I will disentangle the causal effect of women's participation by taking advantage of a randomized experiment, in which the chairperson position of one-third of the village councils in West Bengal (India) was reserved for a woman. Did the village councils in which the chairperson position was reserved for a woman undertake more projects to improve health related infrastructure?