That is the question:
…we evaluate a unique cash transfer experiment targeted at adolescent girls in Malawi that featured both a conditional (CCT) and an unconditional (UCT) treatment arm. We find that while there was a modest improvement in school enrollment in the UCT arm in comparison to the control group, this increase is only 43% as large as the CCT arm.
The schooling condition, however, proved costly for important non-schooling outcomes: teenage pregnancy and marriage rates were substantially higher in the CCT than the UCT arm.
Our findings suggest that a CCT program for early adolescents that transitions into a UCT for older teenagers would minimize this trade-off by improving schooling outcomes while avoiding the adverse impacts of conditionality on teenage pregnancy and marriage.
A new paper from Sarah Baird, Craig McIntosh, and Berk Ozler.
2 Responses
@paul: You need to read the full paper, the motivations are better explained that that.
They also say that “among older teenagers, the UCT arm performs equally well in achievement tests and substantially outperforms the CCT arm in reducing the incidences of marriage and pregnancy”.
“it is clear that CCTs increase school enrollment over and above what is possible by a UCT. However, in the absence of a market failure, such a large distortion in the consumption of education is inefficient”
“we have not found any evidence of incomplete altruism i.e. a conflict of interest between the girls and their parents with respect to her education, which is sometimes mentioned as a justification of a preference for CCTs over UCTs.”
After reading all of that, there’s an answer in fact : do UCT, not CCT.
But if insist you know better than thoses girls if they need an education, then absolutly stop the CCT before the age where marriage and pregnancy become frequent.
the first two paragraphs are interesting. the third is deeply worrying – policy recommendations stemming from heteregeneous treatment effects based on a variable not obviously specified ex ante…