Seminar: Mahesh Karra (Columbia University)

Dr. Mahesh Karra is an Associate Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Director of the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research (POWER). Previously, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Göttingen’s Center for Modern Indian Studies. His academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. He has conducted field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International, and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Population Council. He is a Co-Editor of Studies in Family Planning, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles on public health, social science, and biomedical research on sexual and reproductive health, fertility, and family planning.

Dr. Karra received a B.A. in Economics and Hispanic Studies (Joint Honours) from McGill University, an M.Sc. in Economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and an Sc.D. in Global Health Economics from Harvard University.

Presenting -- 

Title: "Family Planning, Children's Human Capital, and Women’s Well-Being: Experimental Evidence from Urban Malawi"

Abstract: I present findings from a randomized controlled trial in Malawi that identifies the causal impact of a comprehensive intervention to improve access to family planning and reproductive health services. A sample of married women who were either pregnant or had recently given birth were randomly assigned to either an intervention arm or a control arm. Women who were assigned to the intervention arm received a package of services over a two-year period that included: 1) a family counseling; 2) free transportation to a high-quality family planning clinic; and 3) reimbursements for family planning services, including for the treatment of contraceptive-related side effects. I find increases in postpartum contraceptive use (by 5.8 p.p.), which is marked by an increase in long-acting method use (by 5.5 p.p.) after two years of intervention exposure. Estimates from an intent-to-treat survival analyses indicate that women in the intervention group were 43.5 percent less likely to be pregnant within two years of their previous birth relative to the control group. In addition, I find that women who were assigned to the intervention arm were 5.3 p.p. more likely to be employed after two years of intervention exposure. This increase in employment is driven by a 4.5 percentage point increase in wage-earning labor. Finally, I find that children born to mothers assigned to the intervention arm were 0.34 SD taller for their age and were 12.0 p.p. less likely to be stunted within a year of exposure to the family planning intervention. Children born to mothers assigned to the intervention arm also scored 0.23 SD higher on a caregiver-reported measure of cognitive development after two years of intervention exposure. Taken together, these findings suggest that improved access to family planning may have positive downstream effects on health that extend beyond impacts on contraceptive use and fertility.

Location: Hunter East 530 (in the library)