Conditional Cash Transfer, Loss Framing, and SMS Nudges: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in Bangladesh

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become one of the most common policy interventions to increase school attendance, but the cost-effectiveness of such interventions has not attracted the attention it deserves. Hence, in addition to a standard CCT implementation, we experimentally study two potential ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of school attendance interventions: (i) SMS information nudges and (ii) loss framing in CCTs. The former provides school attendance information to parents and the latter exploits the endowment effect. Consistent with the existing literature, CCT intervention significantly increases school attendance. We also find that the loss framing marginally increases attendance over and above the ∗We would like to thank Joseph Altonji, James Berry, Barbara Biasi, Gaurav Dutt, Maulik Jagnani, Costas Meghir, Rohini Pande, Rebecca Thornton, and seminar attendees at Monash and Yale for insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank Akshat Daga, Alekhyo Roychowdhury, Ishaan Malik, and Snehal Modi for research assistance. We benefited from data collection support from MOMODa Foundation and technical support from the Metakave team to automate the process of sending SMS. Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to the participating schools, the students, their parents, and the teachers. Funding from the Shirin Fozdar and Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (17-C244-SMU-004) and Japan Center for Economic Research are gratefully acknowledged. This research was approved by the Singapore Management University Institutional Review Board (IRB-16-082-A092-C2(220)). The trial in this study was registered in the AEA RCT registry under AEARCTR-0002373. All mistakes remain ours.