Nutritional and Schooling Impact of a Social Protection Program in Ethiopia: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of a large-scale Ethiopian government social protection program on long-term anthropometric measures of nutrition status, education attainment and enrollment delay. Our research design uses unique administrative data on the program's regional coverage and combines differences in the intensity of the program across regions with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program. Our findings show that exposure to the program in early childhood leads to better nutrition status and, hence, higher human capital accumulation. The results are robust to different measures for program intensity and different estimation samples, empirical models and placebo tests.