The Impact of Mother’s Education on Child Health and Nutrition in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Burkina Faso

Data from a natural experiment are used to demonstrate how a sudden change in education policy in Burkina Faso is useful in estimating the effect of maternal education on child health. Indeed, a major problem in estimating the effect of maternal education on child health is that unobserved factors may affect maternal education and child health simultaneously, causing endogeneity bias. Most studies on the relationship between maternal education and child health have used instrumental variables to address the endogeneity problem. Because it is very difficult to find instrumental variables that clearly satisfy the requirements of “correlation with maternal education” and “non- correlation to unobserved factors”, instrumental variables do not guarantee a solution to the endogeneity problem. A way around this is the use of natural experiment as an identification strategy.