Re-visiting the Conditional Cash Transfer in India through the Partial Identification Approach

This study re-estimates the causal impacts of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme in India, namely the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) scheme, on maternal and child healthcare use. The main goal is to provide new evidence and to assess the validity of the identification assumptions employed in previous studies on JSY. We achieve this by implementing a conservative partial identification approach. We find that the average treatment effects estimated under the conditional independence assumption are below the lower bound of the treatment effect estimated under weaker but more credible assumptions for institutional delivery, skilled birth attendance and postnatal care use. For antenatal care use and intakes of iron and folic acid supplements, and uptakes of tetanus toxoid injections, the average treatment effects under the conditional independence assumption are above the upper bound. These findings suggest that selection bias could not have been fully controlled for by the observable characteristics.