Job title:
PhD Candidate
Department:
Economics
Research interests:
Fellowship: Rocca Dissertation Research
Fellowship Year(s): 2021
Project/Theme Title: Parent Child Preferences and Secondary School Choice: Evidence from Kenya
Language: Swahili
Abstracts: In many low-income settings, children are expected to make important schooling choices on their own, with little information. This can lead to poor student-school match on dimensions such as distance and affordability of school, or even failure to attend secondary school altogether. These informational barriers are particularly salient for girls and low-income students. In order to study how information can be used as a tool to bridge these informational gaps and improved secondary school enrollment and retention, this study introduces an intervention that provides informational meetings to 7th grade students transitioning to secondary school. These meetings discuss child performance and schooling choices, and occur at the key time before secondary school application decisions are finalized. The intervention randomly varies who attends the meeting: in one treatment group, teachers meet with children alone, and in the second treatment group, teachers meet with both children and their parents. A third control group receives no meetings. The study will examine the impact of the meetings on secondary school choices, enrollment, and educational attainment, and also aim to elicit mechanisms by estimating the effects of the meetings on beliefs about schooling.
Fellowship: Rocca Dissertation Research
Fellowship Year(s): 2020
Project/Theme Title: Heterogeneous Benefits and Demand for Secondary Schooling in Kenya
Language: Swahili
Abstracts: Demand for secondary school in western Kenya remains low, despite improvements in primary school completion rates. 23 percent of individuals who finish primary school fail to enroll in secondary school. One potential constraint is the secondary school application and admissions process, in which misperceptions about school or student characteristics may lead to poor application choices. The proposed research will (i) examine the extent to which students misperceive either the difficulty of admission at secondary schools or their own ability, and (ii) assess the effect of providing information on beliefs, school-student match quality, and educational outcomes.
Fellowship: Rocca Pre-dissertation Research
Fellowship Year(s): 2018
Project/Theme Title: Heterogeneous Benefits and Demand for Secondary Schooling in Kenya
Parent-Child Preferences and Secondary School Choice: Evidence from Kenya