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American Economic Review Vol. 110 No. 3 2020

Maternal Depression, Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Victoria Baranov1; Sonia Bhalotra2; Pietro Biroli3; Joanna Maselko4

1 Department of Economics, University of Melbourne () · 2 Department of Economics, University of Essex, and ISER () · 3 Department of Economics, University of Zurich () · 4 Department of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina (email: )

open access

Abstract

We evaluate the medium-term impacts of treating maternal depression on women’s mental health, financial empowerment, and parenting decisions. We leverage variation induced by a cluster-randomized controlled trial that provided psychotherapy to 903 prenatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. It was one of the world’s largest psych otherapy interventions, and it dramatically reduced postpartum depression. Seven years after psychotherapy concluded, we returned to the study site to find that impacts on women’s mental health had persisted, with a 17 percent reduction in depression rates. The intervention also improved women’s financial empowerment and increased both time- and money-intensive parental investments by between 0.2 and 0.3 standard deviations.

DOI
10.1257/aer.20180511
Volume
110
Issue
3
Pages
824-859
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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