Educational Opportunity and Prosocial Behavior

The study builds on an intervention in Cambodia that offered scholarships to students as they were beginning the 4th grade of primary school. The study follows these students as they are now approximately 20 years old. Applicants who were randomized into a group that were offered the scholarships were substantially more likely to complete primary school; the estimated impact was 14 to 20 percentage points more likely to complete Grade 6 against a counterfactual of 60 percent. This exogenous variation will be used to identify the role that schooling plays in the acquisition of pro-social behavior in early adulthood.

The experiment also randomly assigned some students to receive scholarships based on their baseline poverty status, and some to receive "merit-based" scholarships based on their scores on a math and Khmer language test at baseline. Recipients who were randomly assigned to be offered merit-based scholarships attained higher test scores at the end of primary school (the increase was on the order or 0.20 standard deviations), compared to those offered poverty-based scholarships. The proposed research will exploit this additional exogenous variation to identify the role that this skill acquisition during the schooling process had on pro-social behavior in early adulthood. The study explicitly focuses on this outcome - the study's sister-project (co-authored with Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Deon Filmer) analyzes broader impacts on a wide range of alternative outcomes.