EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment*

Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit

Nava Ashraf, NatalieBau, Corinne Low and Kathleen McGinn

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020, vol. 135, issue 2, 1095-1151

Abstract: Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls’ educational outcomes in a low-resource environment. We find that a negotiation training given to eighth-grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, and these effects did not fade out. To better understand mechanisms, we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments. Negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment, which had no effect. A treatment designed to have more traditional girls’ empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects. Relative to this treatment, negotiation increased enrollment in higher-quality schooling and had larger effects for high-ability girls. These findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents, yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns. We provide evidence for this channel through a lab-in-the-field game and follow-up survey with girls and their guardians.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjz039 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:oup:qjecon:v:135:y:2020:i:2:p:1095-1151.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:135:y:2020:i:2:p:1095-1151.