From Safe Motherhood to Cognitive Ability: Exploring Intrahousehold and Intergenerational Spillovers

Empirical evidence on conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in the education domain suggests increases in school participation but minimal effects on learning. In this paper, we find strong evidence for intrahousehold spillover effects of a CCT programme on children's academic performance, but interestingly, the CCT was not conditioned on education. We study a flagship health and safe motherhood programme from India, and by exploiting plausible exogenous variation in exposure to the programme, show positive effects on reading, writing and maths test scores for non-targeted elder children in the household whose mothers or aunts were potentially exposed to the policy. Our results can be viewed as intergenerational effects of CCTs because the estimated benefits accrue to the future generations of the potential recipients of the transfer payments. We identify higher expenditure on private tutoring as a potential mediating channel for the effects. We also find changes in fertility preferences of women, suggesting a longer-term mediating channel applicable in a standard quantity–quality trade-off setting.