Public Sector Job Guarantees and Family Planning Choices in Rural India

Abstract We exploit the staggered timing of an employment guarantee program in rural India to investigate how providing work opportunities affects married women’s use of family planning methods. Using survey data from rural India, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy and inverse-probability-of-treatment weighting to control for confounding factors influencing family planning decisions. Results suggest an increase of 1.8 percentage points (a 3.2% increase from the variable’s sample mean) in the use of modern family planning methods among married women after the introduction of an employment guarantee program. Results are robust to the choice of controls, regression weights, and matching method. We also demonstrate that program impacts increase with the amount of time a workfare program has been in place. These results provide empirical evidence that employment guarantees that include women can affect family planning choices, with important implications for economic development outcomes.