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American Economic Association, American Economic Review, 3(110), p. 824-859, 2020

DOI: 10.1257/aer.20180511

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

Journal article published in 2020 by Victoria Baranov ORCID, Sonia Bhalotra, Pietro Biroli ORCID, Joanna Maselko
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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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. (JEL G51, I12, J16, O15)