Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment*
By Nava Ashraf, N. Bau, Corinne Low, Kathleen L. McGinn. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls’ educational outcomes in a low-resource environment. We find that a negotiation training given to eighth-grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, and these effects did not fade out. To better understand mechanisms, we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments. Negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment, which had no effect. A treatment designed to have more traditional girls’ empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects. Relative to this treatment, negotiation increased enrollment in higher-quality schooling and had larger effects for high-ability girls. These findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents, yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns. We provide evidence for this channel through a lab-in-the-field game and follow-up survey with girls and their guardians.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/032bf50a2f0d5a044c5604f33310a1a1ccbd47fe
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Citations in the corpus
- Gender gaps in education: The long view (2021, unknown): “…some scholars propose that reforms to education systems could boost women’s empowerment by building critical thinking skills as well as productive, personal, and social competencies that will pay off later in life (Ashraf et al., 2020; Buvinić and O’Donnell, 2019; Murphy-Grahan and Lloyd, 2016).”
- Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. Table 1 Overview of papers included in the meta-analyses Label Context Primary beliefs Treatment A-14 Voters in California Partisan differences in political opinions Yes ABL-20 Parents in Zambia Daughter’s ability and behavior Yes AMR-21 Households in Mozambique Suppor”
- Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “If women have worse negotiating skills than men, for example, providing them with training could close part or all of the observed pay gap (Ashraf et al., 2020).”