The Causal Effect of Maternal Education on Child Mortality: Evidence From a Quasi-Experiment in Malawi and Uganda

Liliana Andriano () and Christiaan W. S. Monden
Additional contact information
Liliana Andriano: University of Oxford
Christiaan W. S. Monden: University of Oxford

Demography, 2019, vol. 56, issue 5, No 8, 1765-1790

Abstract: Abstract Since the 1980s, the demographic literature has suggested that maternal schooling plays a key role in determining children’s chances of survival in low- and middle-income countries; however, few studies have successfully identified a causal relationship between maternal education and under-5 mortality. To identify such a causal effect, we exploited exogenous variation in maternal education induced by schooling reforms introducing universal primary education in the second half of the 1990s in Malawi and Uganda. Using a two-stage residual inclusion approach and combining individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys with district-level data on the intensity of the reform, we tested whether increased maternal schooling reduced children’s probability of dying before age 5. In Malawi, for each additional year of maternal education, children have a 10 % lower probability of dying; in Uganda, the odds of dying for children of women with one additional year of education are 16.6 % lower. We also explored which pathways might explain this effect of maternal education. The estimates suggest that financial barriers to medical care, attitudes toward modern health services, and rejection of domestic violence may play a role. Moreover, being more educated seems to confer enhanced proximity to a health facility and knowledge about the transmission of AIDS in Malawi, and wealth and improved personal illness control in Uganda.

Keywords: Child mortality; Maternal education; Universal primary education; Instrumental variable method; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13524-019-00812-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:56:y:2019:i:5:d:10.1007_s13524-019-00812-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-019-00812-3

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().