Social Interactions and Schooling Decisions

By Rafael Lalive, Alejandra Cattaneo. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to study whether a child's schooling choices are affected by the schooling choices of other children. Identification is based on a randomized targeted intervention that grants a cash subsidy conditional on school attendance to a subgroup of eligible children within small rural villages in Mexico (PROGRESA). This policy change spills over to ineligible children if social interactions are relevant. Results indicate that the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently, and the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village. Moreover, the overall effect of PROGRESA on eligible children is the sum of a direct effect due to cash transfers and an indirect effect due to changes in peer group schooling. Interestingly, the social interactions effect is almost as important as the direct effect.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4afe17e158fb358c10641c4029a0fdb80cb499f

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Citations in the corpus

The Effects of Lottery Prizes on Winners and Their Neighbors: Evidence from the Dutch Postcode Lottery (2011, methodology): “Partial population designs have recently been used to estimate the extent of information dissemination and learning among neighbors and friends (Duflo and Saez 2003; Duflo, Kremer and Robinson 2004; Miguel and Kremer 2004) and peer effects in school participation (Bobonis and Finan 2009; Lalive and ”
Child Schooling and Child Work in the Presence of a Partial Education Subsidy (2017, background): “Finally, several studies have also found that peer effects can increase school enrollment of nontargeted populations, at least in the case of Mexico ’ s PROGRESA/Oportunidades/Prospera CCT (Bobba and Gignoux 2014; Bobonis and Finan 2009; Lalive and Cattaneo 2009).”
The Future in Mind: Aspirations and Forward-Looking Behaviour in Rural Ethiopia (2014, background): “Attendance increased among eligible children at primary school by 5.8 percentage points from a base of 78 per cent, but also increased among children from families above the poverty cutoffs for program eligibility, by 2.1 percentage points from a base of 78 per cent (Lalive and Cattaneo, 2009).”
Peer Effects in Program Participation (2014, unknown): “8In the examples cited in footnote 3, a large part of the estimated effects are due to consumption complementarities: when an individual is treated for worms, the benefit of the technology to their peers declines (Kremer and Miguel, 2007); when a child goes to school, the benefit to their friends of”
Identification and Estimation of Spillover Effects in Randomized Experiments (2017, methodology): “The most credible ones rely on random assignment of peers (see Sacerdote, 2014, for a recent survey) or random assignment of a treatment (Lalive and Cattaneo, 2009; Bobonis and Finan, 2009; Dieye, Djebbari, and Barrera-Osorio, 2014).”
Shaping Professional Development to Promote the Diffusion of Instructional Expertise Among Teachers (2013, background): “This definition stems from economic literature on spillover effects of investments in human capital development (e.g., Berge, 2011; Bjorvatn & Tungodden, 2010; Blundell, Dearden, Meghir, & Sianesi, 1999; Croce & Ghignoni, 2012; Kogut & Zander, 1992; Lalive & Cattaneo, 2009).”
Identification of Social Interactions (2011, unknown): “53Li and Lee conduct in-sample and out-of-sample prediction analyses and find that out of sample prediction is improved when endogenous social interactions are included. Thus, regardless of whether the estimate of the social interactions parameter is simply picking up selection effects or group leve”