Mahesh Karra, Columbia University

Presentation Title: Family Planning, Women’s Employment, and Household Labor Supply

About the Presentation

We conduct a randomized controlled trial that provides pregnant and postpartum women with comprehensive access to family planning services. We assess the causal impact of the family planning intervention on women’s and households’ labor market outcomes. We find evidence of a 3.1 percentage point (p.p.) increase in employment and a 2.4 p.p. increase in labor force participation, along with a 6.3 percent increase in hours worked, among individuals in intervention households. These results are primarily driven by a 4.8 p.p. increase in women’s employment and a 19.9 percent increase in the number of hours they work. An exploration of potential pathways suggests that increases in employment are associated with reductions in short-term pregnancies among women in the treatment group. Consistent with this finding, our results suggest that the marginal pregnancy that was avoided would have had substantial negative effects on women’s employment. 

About the Speaker

I am 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). Prior to recently joining Columbia, I was a tenured Associate Professor at Boston University. My academic and research interests lie in development economics, global health, and applied demography. My research investigates the relationships between population, health, and economic development; over the past 15 years, I have worked in research and programmatic settings in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. I have also worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International and served as a consultant to the World Bank and the World Health Organization. I am also currently a Co-Editor of Studies in Family Planning. I received a B.A. in Economics and Hispanic Studies 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. 

Seminar Format:

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity.  Please use this link to RSVP for in-person attendance.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom registration link.  Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send a request to the meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.