Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions
Education conditional cash transfer programs may increase school attendance in part due to the information they transmit to parents about their child's attendance. This paper presents experimental evidence that the information content of an ed...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/720071529003623702/Incentivizing-school-attendance-in-the-presence-of-parent-child-information-frictions http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29905 |
| Summary: | Education conditional cash transfer
programs may increase school attendance in part due to the
information they transmit to parents about their
child's attendance. This paper presents experimental
evidence that the information content of an education
conditional cash transfer program, when given to parents
independently of any transfer, can have a substantial effect
on school attendance. The effect is as large as 75 percent
of the effect of a conditional cash transfer incentivizing
parents, and not significantly different from it. In
contrast, a conditional transfer program incentivizing
children instead of parents is nearly twice as effective as
an "information only" treatment providing the same
information to parents about their child's attendance.
Taken together, these results suggest that children have
substantial agency in their schooling decisions. The paper
replicates the findings from most evaluations of conditional
cash transfers that gains in attendance achieved by
incentivizing parents financially do not translate into
gains in test scores. But it finds that both the information
only treatment and the alternative intervention
incentivizing children substantially improve math test scores. |
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