Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions

Abstract

Many countries use CCTs targeted to parents to promote schooling. Attendance conditions may work through two channels: incentivization and information. If children have private information, (i) providing attendance information to parents may increase attendance inexpensively relative to CCTs and (ii) it may be more effective to incentivize children, who have full information, than parents. Tackling both questions in a unified experimental setting, we find that information alone improves parental monitoring and has a large effect relative to our CCT. Incentivizing children is at least as effective as incentivizing parents––importantly, not because parents were able to appropriate transfers to children. (JEL D82, D83, I21, I22, I28, L31, O15)