social capital might affect child nutritional status, as hypothesized here. In this paper, the reverse causality issue is overcome using longitudinal data which help in disentangling the temporal order. Specifically, maternal participation is measured before child’s nutritional indicators.

Third, the decision to participate might be endogenous given that becoming a member of any organization is a voluntary decision. More generally, a mother’s unobservable characteristics might drive both the decision to participate and the child nutritional status. I test for potential unobserved heterogeneity using fixed effects at community level.

In the present analysis, social participation is shown to be an effective instrument against children’s undernourishment in the first year of life for those children born to uneducated mothers. However, less clear, are the mechanisms beyond the potential positive effect of maternal social participation. I explore the hypothesis that social participation facilitates access to additional resources by increasing the likelihood of receiving support. Even if receiving support has been found to be positively associated with nutritional status at 1 year, it is not a channel through which maternal participation affects child nutritional status. Unfortunately, due to data limitations, it is not possible to test the other two main pathways suggested in the social capital literature, i.e. the “information pathway” and the “empowerment pathway”. The first one is the provision to mothers of essential information about child care and health which they did not acquire by formal education (Durlauf and Fafchamps, 2004). The second pathway suggests that social participation might increase maternal aspirations and their ability to plan the future by learning from the positive experiences of others (Macours and Vakis, 2008).

# **2.  Social Capital in the Literature**

In previous studies social capital has been defined in different ways. The more exhaustive definition of social capital includes two main components: _structural social capital_ and _cognitive social capital_ (Putnam et al., 1993). Structural social capital reflects the connectedness of individuals within a given community ( _bonding social capital_ ) in the form of active participation. Cognitive social capital reflects the feeling of a sense of community in the form of trust, social cohesion, norms and perceptions of reciprocity. The relationship between social and cognitive capital is particularly complex because it is not clear how they affect each other.<sup>3</sup> In the empirical literature social capital has mostly been measured using the two components separately. Looking at health outcomes, several empirical studies find a positive association between structural social capital and physical health (Harpham, 2003; Yamamura, 2011; Rose, 2000; Poortinga, 2006; Giordano and Lindstrom, 2010), and between cognitive social capital and mental health (Veenstra 2005; Lindstrom et al. 2001; De Silva and Harpham, 2007).

In this paper I consider maternal structural social capital and measure it by looking at their voluntary participation in one or more community organisations. However, I also take into account the cognitive dimension as a determinant of social participation. I am expecting that, if the mother

> 3 For example it might be that social participation affects trust (Putnam, 2001; Coleman, 1990) but also the reverse relation is plausible (Brehm and Rhan, 1997).

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