Does Cash for School Influence Young Women's Behavior in the Longer Term? Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Punjab Female School Stipend Program, a female-targeted conditional cash transfer program in Pakistan, was implemented in response to gender gaps in education. An early evaluation of the program shows that the enrollment of eligible girls in middle-school increased in the short term by nearly 9 percentage points. This paper uses regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference analyses to show that five years into the program implementation positive impacts do persist. Beneficiary adolescent girls are more likely to progress through and complete middle school and work less. There is suggestive evidence that participating girls delay their marriage and have fewer births by the time they are 19 years old. Also, girls who are exposed to the program later-on, and eligible for the benefits given in high school, increase their rates of matriculating into and completing high school. The persistence of impacts can potentially translate into gains in future productivity, consumption, inter-generational human capital accumulation and desired fertility. Lastly, there is no evidence that the program has negative spillover effects on educational outcomes of male siblings. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: I25, J13, J21, O15

Impact of the Kenya Cash Transfer for Orphans and Vulnerable Children on early pregnancy and marriage of adolescent girls

“…These CCTs generally included household co-responsibilities in order to receive benefits, such as health clinic visits for children under five, school enrollment and primary-aged children and attendance at monthly health education meetings. Alam and colleagues (2010), used a quasi-experimental case-control design to demonstrate that the Pakistani Female School Stipend Program, also a CCT targeted towards girls in sixth to eighth grades, increased age at marriage by 1.2 to 1.5 years over a six-year period. The same program had no impact on the probability of ever giving birth and only a weakly significant effect on the total number of live births.…”

The Efficacy of Interventions to Reduce Adolescent Childbearing in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries: A Systematic Review

“…(Each cohort received the same intervention.) The remaining four evaluations of interventions that reported at least marginally significant findings were evaluations of cash transfer programs (Alam, Baez, and Del Carpio 2010;Baird 2010) and of a health services intervention (Portner, Beegle, and Christiaensen 2011).…”

“…Of the nine evaluations of interventions measuring impact on adolescent marriage, three revealed an unambiguously significant impact in the direction of reducing early marriage ( Erulkar and Muthengi 2009;Gulemetova-Swan 2009;Hallfors et al 2011). Four of the remaining six interventions in this category yielded results that were in the direction of such impact but were either marginally statistically significant or only some of the findings were statistically significant (Alam, Baez, and Del Carpio 2010;Baird et al 2010;Rahman and Daniel 2010;Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer 2011 [free uniform component]). Of the nine studies that evaluated contraceptive use, five found exclusively significant effects (Kim et al 2001;Lou et al 2004;Daniel, Masilamani, and Rahman 2008;Kanesathasan et al 2008;Erulkar and Muthengi 2009), two found mixed results (Eggleston et al 2000;Okonofua et al 2003), and two found…”

“…Three studies evaluated interventions that occurred in India (Daniel, Masilamam, and Rahman 2008;Kanesathasan et al 2008;Rahman and Daniel 2010). Elsewhere in Asia, the included studies evaluated interventions in China (Lou et al 2004), Mongolia (Cartagena et al 2006), and Pakistan (Alam, Baez, and Del Carpio 2010). In Latin America and the Caribbean, studies evaluated interventions in Brazil (Magnani et al 2001), Chile (Cabezón et al 2005), Honduras and Nicaragua (Stecklov et al 2006), Jamaica (Eggleston et al 2000), and Mexico (Stecklov et al 2006;Gulemetova-Swan 2009).…”

“…Of the four that found mixed or marginally significant results, the results from the assessment of the uniform project reported by Duflo and colleagues (2011) were the strongest: significant decreases in likelihood of early marriage three years and five years later, and a marginally significant decrease seven years later. The evaluation of the Female School Stipend Program in Pakistan (Alam, Baez, and Del Carpio 2010) and of the PRACHAR project in India (Rahman and Daniel 2010) each reported a marginally significant increase (p < 0.10) in age at marriage, and the evaluation of the Zomba Cash Transfer Program in Malawi (Baird et al 2010) found significant effects for girls who had recently dropped out of school but not among girls who had never left school. Of the two interventions that found no significant change, one found an increase that was not statistically significant (Kanesathasan et al 2008) and one found no change (Duflo et al 2011 [curriculum intervention]).…”