nutritional status, and vaccinations) and schooling, focusing on gender differences in child impacts.

Our results imply that the conditional cash transfers provided to eligible households under the _Apni Beti Apna Dhan_ program positively affected girls’ birth and survival as measured by changes in the sex ratio of mother’s total living children over time. The program had inconclusive effects on mothers’ preferences for female children and for total desired fertility. We also find that parents increased their investment in daughters’ human capital as a result of the program. Families made greater post-natal health investments in girls after the program, with some mixed evidence of improving health status in the short and medium term. Further evidence also suggests weak but consistently positive impacts on education: the early cohort of eligible school-age girls are not more likely to attend school, however, conditional on first attending any school, they may be more likely to continue their education. These early results carry many interesting implications for similar programs in other states of India, including Rajasthan’s _Raj Laxmi_ scheme and Tamil _Nadu’s Puratchi Thalaivi Dr. Jailalitha_ Scheme.

Our results, evaluated about 10 years after the program was introduced, suggest that poor households respond to long-term conditional transfers by meeting the conditionality (birth of a daughter) and changing their behavior towards daughters. Clearly it would be important to measure these impacts in the longer term. Firstly, it will be important to evaluate how the program affects girls’ age at marriage since the program seeks to encourage households to delay girls’ marriage beyond 18. Secondly, as the cohort ages further, the impact of educational incentives remains to be fully analyzed. As the minimum requirement to receive educational benefits is grade 8, it will be particularly interesting to see how this nonlinearity in the benefit scheme manifests over the long term i.e. whether families are motivated to increase education but invest only up to the minimum point.

We note several limitations of our analysis and possible extensions. Firstly, the sample size afforded by the Haryana sub-sample of the NFHS is small, and the limitations of the data at hand have been discussed at length in the paper. More comprehensive data sources such as the National Sample Survey (NSS) could be explored, particularly if they have better direct or indirect measures of household program eligibility. Secondly, this work may be immediately extended to the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects by individual or household type, given that various interest groups are affected. It is also of paramount interest to understand differential program impacts across different regions within the state; for example in areas with less access to schooling, health facilities and/or financial institutions. Other analytical extensions include the use of econometric strategies to handle the issue of censoring in the sex ratio, and further exploration of instrumental variables strategies to allow estimation of effects on outcomes such as total fertility which are endogenously related to the birth-history eligibility criteria. Interesting instrumental variables that could be explored further with richer data include the role of the community ( _anganwadi)_ health worker and the availability of post-offices, given that the program is administered through the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) health infrastructure and savings accounts at post offices.

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