Exploring the heterogeneous impacts of Indonesia's conditional cash transfer scheme (PKH) on maternal health care utilisation using instrumental causal forests

Vishalie Shah, Julia Hatamyar, Taufik Hidayat and Noemi Kreif

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper uses instrumental causal forests, a novel machine learning method, to explore the treatment effect heterogeneity of Indonesia's conditional cash transfer scheme on maternal health care utilisation. Using randomised programme assignment as an instrument for enrollment in the scheme, we estimate conditional local average treatment effects for four key outcomes: good assisted delivery, delivery in a health care facility, pre-natal visits, and post-natal visits. We find significant treatment effect heterogeneity by supply-side characteristics, even though supply-side readiness was taken into account during programme development. Mothers in areas with more doctors, nurses, and delivery assistants were more likely to benefit from the programme, in terms of increased rates of good assisted delivery outcome. We also find large differences in benefits according to indicators of household poverty and survey wave, reflecting the possible impact of changes in programme design in its later years. The impact on post-natal visits in 2013 displayed the largest heterogeneity among all outcomes, with some women less likely to attend post-natal check ups after receiving the cash transfer in the long term.

Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12803 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2501.12803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().