Behavioral Nudges Reduced Dropout Risk among Vulnerable Students during the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

In a companion paper (Lichand, Christen and Van Egeraat, 2022), we documented that learning losses in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic were magnified by the fact that most schools neglected students' socio-emotional skills during remote learning. Taking advantage of a cluster randomized control trial that sent high school students or their parents text messages targeting their socio-emotional skills over 2020, we showed that such messages prevented 7.5 percent of learning losses in math and 24 percent of those in Portuguese. In this paper, we study whether the intervention also reduced dropout risk, especially among students at the highest risk of abandoning school.