Wei Lin, ARE
Stephanie Bonds, Econ
Wei: Fertilizer Overuse and Individual Learning
Stephanie: Parent-Child Preferences and Secondary School Choice: Evidence from Kenya
Abstracts
Wei: Using a large-scale household panel survey and pilot survey, we find that Chinese farmers systematically overuse fertilizer. Such overuse exhibits path dependence and downward rigidity. We partner with local governments and a technology company which co-developed a mobile application that acquires soil testing results from an administrative dataset, regularly updated by the government for millions of plots. We conduct an RCT that leverages this mobile application to understand the economic benefits associated with the adoption of such technology and to cast a light on the mechanisms behind fertilizer overuse. Then we try to build a learning model to explain such decision-making process.
Stephanie: 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, or even failure to attend secondary school altogether, particularly for girls and other marginalized groups. In order to study how informational meetings can be used as a tool to bridge these informational gaps in a low-income context, I introduce an intervention that provides informational meetings to 8th grade students transitioning to secondary school in western Kenya. 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. I will estimate the impact of the meetings on secondary school choices, enrollment, and educational attainment. I also aim to elicit mechanisms by estimating the effects of the meetings on beliefs about schooling.