Reviewing the Existing Evidence of the Conditional Cash Transfer in India through the Partial Identification Approach

This paper re-estimates the causal impacts of a conditional cash transfer programme in India, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), on maternal and child healthcare use. The main goal is to provide new evidence and assess the validity of the identification assumptions employed in previous studies on the JSY, through the conservative partial identification approach. We find that the average treatment effects estimated under the conditional independence assumption lie outside the bound of the treatment effect estimated under weaker but more credible assumptions, thereby suggesting that the selection bias could not have been fully controlled for by the observable characteristics and that the average treatment effects estimated in the previous studies may have been over or under estimated.