Incentivizing School Attendance in the Presence of Parent-Child Information Frictions Presenter: Damien de Walque Co-author: Christine Valente Abstract
If parents do not perfectly observe whether their children attend school, (i) cash transfers conditional on an attendance target may increase school attendance in part through an information effect and (ii) incentivizing children directly could be more cost effective than incentivizing parents. We isolate experimentally and for the first time the information effect of a CCT and find that it is large. Incentivizing children is at least as effective as incentivizing parents–– and importantly, not because parents were able to appropriate conditional transfers made to children. These results imply the possibility of large savings relative to traditional CCTs.