APL (Ajiken Power Lunch)

Thursday, 3rd of July, 12:00 to 1:15 p.m.

IDE-JETRO C22 Meeting Room 　

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become one of the most common policy interventions to increase school attendance, but whether and how much their impacts vary throughout the year are not well understood. Using unique daily attendance and rainfall data from a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh, we explore the seasonality in CCT impacts and how the seasonality varies by gender. We find strong evidence that the impact of conditional cash transfers depends on agricultural seasonality. In particular, the impact is substantially higher during the harvest season. On the other hand, there is no such dependence for the SMS treatment, which only provides attendance information to households. We also find that the rainfall during the harvest season tends to weaken the CCT impact, but not during the non-harvest season. Interestingly, the effect of seasonality seems to exist for both agricultural and non-agricultural households and for both boys and girls, except possibly for boys from agricultural households. Our results potentially underscore the importance of domestic work as a form of child labor at large and caution against focusing narrowly on boys from agricultural households, who are often believed to be most vulnerable to seasonal child labor.

Professor Tomoki Fujii (Singapore Management University)

Momoe Makino