Polygamy and Child Health Do babies get sick if daddy has many wives?

This paper uses household data from 28 African countries to study the effects of polygyny on child health. We contribute to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence that quantifies the costs of polygyny rather than focusing on its determinants. Our conservative baseline results indicate that ceteris paribus moving a baby from a monogamous to a polygynous household reduces its height-for-age Z-score by 5.8 % of the sample standard deviation. For robustness, we provide instrumental variables results by generating exogenous variation in polygyny using fertility shocks experienced by the household head’s first wife. Instrumental variable results are qualitatively similar to the fixed effects results in that child health is a decreasing function of the number of wives. While these results are in line with existing theoretical research, the estimated causal effect of polygyny is moderate