Alex Armand, NCID researcher receives funding from the Ramon Areces Foundation to carry out the project: "Towards an understanding of parental expectations of returns to education in developing countries."
"Education is a very important aspect of a country’s growth,” explains the researcher, and therefore, “it is essential to understand how parents and/or children make decisions when making this type of investment in human capital".
The project aims to understand parents’ expectations that may affect their decisions on their child’s education and how these expectations may change over time. An essential aspect of the project is to analyze the information that these parents receive. "Many social policies in the world ignore the informational component when targeting low-income households," says Alex Armand.
Understanding how expectations work is important in developing countries mainly because, as the researcher explains, "the situation of labor markets can be very uncertain, in terms of high rates of unemployment, for example."
Labor market conditions that affect adults can have obvious and direct effects, such as the reduction of income, but they also bring about indirect effects, for example changing parents’ expectations about the value of education.
"This research proposes to use a unique database containing subjective expectations on yields in secondary education," says Alex Armand. This data was collected in Macedonia as part of an evaluation of conditional cash transfers during 2010 and 2013.
The Ramón Areces Foundation has awarded a total of €432,000 to twelve new research projects in the field of social sciences in the areas of international economics, public economics, industrial economics and regulation, commercial distribution, economics of education and economic history.
With this aid, reaching its fourteenth session, the foundation aims to contribute to social science research conducted by highly qualified individuals and therein provide a stimulus to new projects for the benefit of broader society and, ultimately, the international research community.
The selected research projects will receive €36,000 to fund a maximum of two years of work.