Child Control in Education Decisions

Abstract

I report the results of a field experiment in Gurgaon, India that offered cash and noncash incentives to learn either to children or to their parents. While I find no evidence that the identity of the recipient or form of the reward mattered in the aggregate, noncash incentives targeted to children were more effective for initially low-performing children while cash incentives were more effective for high-performing children. To explore the mechanisms behind this result, I present a model of household education production and find additional empirical results consistent with the model.