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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.
Christine Valente completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Sheffield in 2008, and since then she has held academic positions at the University of Nottingham and University of Sheffield, before joining the University of Bristol in October 2012. Her main research interests revolve around the formation of human capital (health and education) in developing countries. Examples of her work include analyses of the determinants of child mortality in South Asia (e.g., focusing on inter-group differences in child mortality in India, or on access to birth control in the form of abortion in Nepal) and micro-econometric studies of the impact of violent civil conflict on pregnancy outcomes, child health, and education.
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