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

Andaleeb Alam (), Javier Baez and Ximena Del Carpio ()
Additional contact information
Andaleeb Alam: World Bank

No 5703, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: conditional cash transfers; female education; female labor participation; fertility; Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 J13 J21 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5703.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does cash for school influence young women's behavior in the longer term ? evidence from Pakistan (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5703

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().