The effect of health facility births on newborn mortality in Malawi

Neonatal sepsis, one of the leading causes for newborn births in low income countries, which is less likely to be managed in low-resource settings like Malawi, only accounts for about 5% of the neonatal mortality (Perin et al, 2022).

If labour start timing is exogenous, then we would get a uniform distribution. However, the number of observations in each category in our sample is not uniformly distributed after considering that the length of each labour timing category is different. If we categorize mothers into two groups, such as 5 pm–5am and 5am-5 pm, the proportion of responses are 53.9% and 46.1% respectively, where we still do not obtain a balanced distribution but the difference becomes smaller. It is possible that the measurement of labor timing may confront recall bias. Although we recognize some limits of the use of labor timing as an instrument variable, we validate our instrument variable in the empirical strategy section by examining the orthogonality condition.