Thursday, November 4, 2010

Cash for babies

Our findings show that the program in Honduras, which may have inadvertently been designed to create incentives to have children, may have in fact raised fertility by somewhere between 2-4 percentage points – a non-negligible impact in a country where fertility is relatively high.
From a paper I was talking about in class today by Stecklov and others.

The program in question is the Honduran conditional cash transfer program that pays money to mothers if kids go to school and health check ups. Unlike other countries like Mexico and Nicaragua Honduras extended payments to mothers who had children after the program was announced.

I think the question is did it cause them to have more babies in the long run or did families just have babies sooner then they would have without the transfer.
The data available is too short to figure that out (only 2 years between the last round of data and the pre-program data).




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