Unconditional cash transfers and child schooling: a meta-analysis
Published in Empirical Economics, 2024
Recommended citation: Chong, Z.Z. and Lau, S.Y. (2024). Unconditional cash transfers and child schooling: a meta-analysis. Empirical Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-024-02647-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00181-024-02647-3
Various “demand-side” interventions have been found effective empirically to increase student participation in developing countries. There are growing rigorous evidence on schooling impacts of unconditional cash transfers, but few to none have systematically reviewed the literature. This paper fills the gap through applying a meta-regression analysis to 38 studies of 22 programmes in 18 countries. We find unconditional cash transfers improve both student enrolment and attendance, and the result is robust to the exclusion of studies with a high risk of bias. We also find statistically significant heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies. However, none of the moderators in this paper, namely transfer size, whether the programme is pilot, income per capita, and poverty head headcount ratio, explains the variation in effect sizes. Our paper adds support to the need of more evaluations on schooling impacts of unconditional cash transfers and how tweaks in programme designs could make a difference.
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Recommended citation: Chong, Z.Z. and Lau, S.Y. (2024) Unconditional cash transfers and child schooling: A meta-analysis. Empirical Economics, 68(2), pp. 639–666. doi:10.1007/s00181-024-02647-3.