Abstract
Education conditional cash transfer programs may increase school attendance in part due to the they transmit to parents about their child's attendance. This paper presents experimental evidence that the 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 treatment providing the same 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 only treatment and the alternative intervention incentivizing children substantially improve math test scores.
Highlights
Governments the world over strive to incentivize parents to ensure that their children attend school regularly through subsidies, fines, and truancy laws (BBC, 2005, Maynard et al, 2017)
In the presence of information frictions between parents and children, (i) providing additional information to the parents about their child’s attendance may increase attendance at a relatively low cost, so that part of the effect of conditional cash transfers (CCT) may come from the information value of the conditional transfer, and (ii) incentivizing children may be more effective than incentivizing parents
We carried out a randomized controlled trial in 173 schools of Manica province, Mozambique, where we evaluate the effectiveness of providing weekly attendance reports to parents of girls in senior primary school and compare this with the effectiveness of (i) a conditional transfer program implicitly offering parents the same information as well as incentivizing a 90% and above attendance rate by giving cash to the parents of eligible girls and (ii) a conditional transfer program implicitly offering parents the same information as well as incentivizing a 90% and above attendance rate by giving vouchers to the eligible girls
Summary
Governments the world over strive to incentivize parents to ensure that their children attend school regularly through subsidies, fines, and truancy laws (BBC, 2005, Maynard et al, 2017). We replicate findings from most evaluations of CCTs that gains in attendance achieved by incentivizing parents financially do not translate into gains in test scores Both the information treatment and the children’s incentives treatment improve scores on the (ASER or “Annual Status of Education”) math test by 8.5 to 9.4% of the control group’s mean. This suggests that improved attendance is beneficial for cognitive skills, but that conditional cash transfers directed at parents may have counterproductive effects, echoing findings by Baird, de Hoop and Özler (2013) that increases in the monetary value of conditional transfers for which the household is eligible increases adolescent psychological distress
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