Seminar in Economics | with Abhijeet Singh
Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Professor Abhijeet Singh, SSE who will present "Navigating Multiple Frictions: Experimental evidence for impacting the take-up of school vouchers".
Abstract
Many eligible families fail to apply for social programs. This study evaluates a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) with three interventions --- information provision, application support and the combination --- aimed at increasing take-up of vouchers for disadvantaged children in private schools under India’s Right to Education (RTE) Act. The interventions were conducted in parallel in four differentiated populations across urban and rural areas in Chhattisgarh, allowing us to detect (i) complementarities across program components and (ii) heterogeneity across pre-specified target population subgroups. We find that application assistance significantly increases take-up in all populations, but with significantly different effect sizes, while information provision is effective only in urban areas. We find no evidence of complementarities (or substitutability) between program components. Complementary infrastructure, in the form of public assistance centres, rationalize the differences in the effects of information across settings and the additivity in the effects of program components. Our results suggest that there is substantial scope for better targeting of such interventions to increase program take-up in this setting, but the bundling of program components is less crucial.
More about the Speaker
The seminar takes place at Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavägen 65, room A348.
Please contact kathrine.abelson@hhs.se if you have any questions.
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