the original HIPC Initiative. Neither the MDRI nor the original HIPC Initiative is associated with any change in infant mortality.

The results in Section 4 are robust to including a dummy variable for birth intervals less than 24 months (which increases the probability of infant death (WHO, 2005)), a variable for mother’s age, and age squared (columns (6), (7), and (8), respectively). Additionally, the within-country results (including mother-specific characteristics) in column (2) in Table 5 are identical to the those in column (1) in Table 9, which applies country fixed effects that vary by birth cohorts of the mothers.

There may be concerns with the validity of the data on infants obtained from the DHS. First, mothers may not accurately remember the birth and death (if applicable) dates of their children. If so, there may be problems with recall bias in the sample employed in this paper. This is not deemed to be a serious problem since the DHS apply rigorous tests to ensure the accuracy of the mortality data and mothers tend to remember important events such as the death of a child. Nevertheless, because there is a peak in the distribution of infant deaths at 12 months of age, I redefine the infant mortality variable as babies dying before of or in their twelfth month of age. The estimation result is presented in column (3) in Table 9. I observe no changes in the baseline findings because of this. Estimates are also robust to dropping the babies born before 1985 (column (4) in Table 9). Although the average effect and the significance level (the p value is 0.058) go down a little, the effects on the different sub-samples are stable to this change (results not shown).

I test if reported infant mortality is connected with debt relief at Decision Point of the HIPC Initiative by using DHS data on infant mortality from earlier surveys.<sup>8</sup> Here, I apply a test developed by Kudamatsu (2012) in which the average infant mortality rate of mothers born in the same year, in the same country, and who give birth in the same year is compared between the used DHS and an earlier DHS. If recall bias is a serious problem, the infant mortality rate would change systematically in relation to HIPC at Decision Point. Judging from the results in Table 7, this does not appear to be the case.

Second, if fertility choices vary by women’s socioeconomic status and if this is systematically related to HIPC, one concern may be that the results on debt relief at Decision Point are driven by differences in fertility rather than infant mortality since the women who identify the effect of debt relief in the withinmother estimations are different from other mothers in terms of age, poverty levels, formal schooling, and residency. The comparison of infant mortality between women in HIPCs and non-HIPCs giving birth in the same years in the within-mother estimations would consequently be less credible. Again, I follow Kudamatsu (2012) to investigate if fertility of mothers changes depending on socioeconomic Completion Point before or in 2006 and in the year of Completion Point for HIPCs which reached Completion Point after 2006.

> 8Earlier surveys available for 44 countries in the sample.

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