Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A "Labeled Cash Transfer" for Education †

By Najy Benhassine, F. Devoto, Esther Duflo, P. Dupas, Victor Pouliquen. 2015

459 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a “labeled cash transfer” (LCT): a small cash transfer made to fathers of school-aged children in poor rural communities, not conditional on school attendance but explicitly labeled as an education support program. We document large gains in school participation. Adding conditionality and targeting mothers made almost no difference in our context. The program increased parents’ belief that education was a worthwhile investment, a likely pathway for the results. (JEL H23, I24, 128, I38, J24, O15, O18) This paper evaluates the impact of a “labeled cash transfer” (LCT). The program we evaluate features small transfers, targeted to poor communities (with all households eligible in those communities), and paid out to fathers. The program is unconditional but retains an implicit endorsement of education through its school-based enrollment procedure. This program was designed and implemented on a (randomized) pilot basis by Morocco’s Ministry of Education. Within the same experiment, conducted over 600 communities, we compared it to three variants: (i) making the transfer explicitly conditional on regular attendance, (ii) making payments to mothers instead of fathers, and (iii) doing both at the same time.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/103ef66d2fd8de03bbee3494f3e9b8e1b4a4f4e4

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Cash, Vouchers, and Food Transfers on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Northern Ecuador (2016, unknown): “Evidence shows that how the intervention is framed and labeled affects subsequent behavior ( Benhassine et al. 2013, Buller et al. forthcoming .”
Behavioral Economics of Education: Progress and Possibilities (2015, unknown): “Children of treated mothers scored .037 to .069 standard deviations higher on numeracy tests than children of untreated mothers Benhassine et al. (2013) Small “labeled cash transfer” (LCT) to fathers of children in poor rural communities Survey data for more than 47000 primary school students in…”
How Are SNAP Benefits Spent? Evidence from a Retail Panel (2018, background): “Important exceptions include Kooreman’s (2000) study of a child tax credit in the Netherlands, Feldman’s (2010) study of a change in US federal income tax withholding, and Benhassine et al.’s (2015) study of a labeled cash transfer in Morocco. Methodologically, this paper shows how to test for the f”
The impact of education programmes on learning and school participation in low- and middle-income countries (2016, background): “Conditional cash transfers do, however, have a higher cost attached to them because of the resources required to monitor and enforce conditionalities (Benhassine et al. 2013).”
THE SHORT-TERM IMPACT OF UNCONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS TO THE POOR: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM KENYA (2016, unknown): “Thus, we find little evidence that providing cash transfers to women versus men differentially affects outcomes, broadly in line with the findings of Benhassine et al. (2013).16 However, we note that this lack of significant differences may result from lower power in the comparison between male and…”
Child Schooling and Child Work in the Presence of a Partial Education Subsidy (2017, background): “Finally, as Benhassine et al. (2015) show in Morocco, even a “nudge” or an unenforced condition can be enough to induce beneficiaries to comply.”
Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia (2020, unknown): “In that sense, this program is more akin to a “labeled” CCT program, such as the Moroccan program studied by Benhassine et al. (2015).”
Generating Skilled Self-Employment in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Uganda* (2014, background): “Existing research on UCTs mostly focuses on education and health investments in children, and generally finds high impacts (Baird et al., 2011; Benhassine et al., 2013).”
Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient (2015, unknown): “Second, we weight observations in Morocco’s Tayssir to account for the sampling structure as in Benhassine et al. (2015). 19.”
What We Learn about Girls’ Education from Interventions That Do Not Focus on Girls (2019, background): “Six of the general interventions are similarly related to offering cash for education in different countries (Eyal, Woolard, and Burns 2014; Maluccio, Murphy, and Regalia 2010; Edmonds and Shrestha 2014; Benhassine et al. 2015; Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer 2017), building village schools in Afghanistan ”
Self-Targeting: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia (2016, background): “…Note, however, that although PKH is formally a conditional cash transfer program, with transfers dependent on health take-up and school enrollment, these conditions are typically not enforced in practice, so this can be thought of as closer to a “labeled” cash grant, as in Benhassine et al. ð2013Þ.”