Policy-induced Social Interactions and Schooling Decisions
Pre-print, Working paper: This paper considers a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households in small rural villages and studies the effects of the geographic proximity between villages on individual enrollment decisions. Exploiting variations in the treatment status across contiguous villages generated by the randomized evaluation design, the paper finds that the additional effect stemming from the local density of neighboring recipients amounts to roughly one third of the direct effect of program receipt. Importantly, these spatial externalities are concentrated among children from beneficiary households. This suggests that the intervention has enhanced educational aspirations by triggering social interactions among the targeted population.
Keywords JEL
Keywords
- Spatial externalities
- Social interactions
- Peer effects
- Conditional cash transfers
Internal reference
- G-MonD Working Paper n°22
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 1