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This paper explores the effect of maternal employment on the nutritional status of children below age 5 years in Bangladesh using data from the 2014 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey. Since mothers' choice to participate in the labor market is endogenous, the estimation of the causal effect of maternal employment on child health is statistically challenging. To correct for the endogeneity of maternal employment, we employ instrumental variable (IV) estimation. While our ordinary least squares results show that mothers' employment has no significant effect on children's nutritional outcome, the IV estimates suggest that maternal employment significantly decreases children's height-for-age Z-score. This result is contrary to conventional wisdom advocating for maternal employment to positively affect child health and well-being. We, therefore, argue for effective policy interventions-such as childcare centers at workplaces, flexibility in working hours including part-time options for mothers, restraining child marriages, and strengthening maternal and child health-care services through community health centers-to foster children's health as well as maternal employment in the country.

The extreme hunger and deprivation that recurs every year in the lean season in northern Bangladesh, locally known as the Monga, is mainly due to the malfunctioning local labor and credit markets. Using data covering 5,600 extreme poor households in the Mongaprone region, we investigate in detail the role of social capital in securing employment and obtaining informal loans. Correcting for the endogeneity of social capital by the heteroscedasticity-based method proposed by Klein and Vella (2010) and also by the standard IV method for a robustness check, we document that social capital plays an important role in obtaining both wage-and self-employment. We also document a weak negative effect of social capital on obtaining informal loans. We explain our results in terms of the role of horizontal and vertical components of our measures of social capital in influencing different outcomes.

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