Determining the effects of conditional cash transfers on educational attainment

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The concerns with how to narrow the socio-economic gap in education have been a major policy issue forseveral decades. In order to encourage young people, especially those from low-income families, to stayin education, a number of countries have put forward conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. In theUK, the Education Maintenance Allowance programme (EMA) was designed to raise the post-compulsoryenrolment rate. Although a large body of research has investigated the impact of EMA on theparticipation, retention and achievement in secondary school, there is very little literature exploring thelong-term effect of EMA. This research is planning to use the Next Steps and Our Future datasets andadopt quasi-experimental methods, such as regression discontinuity design, propensity score matchingand entropy balancing. It will contribute to the existing literature by providing more evidence on the longtermimpact of EMA since its roll-out nationally and its comparison with the impact of the policy that hasreplaced it (16-19 Bursary Fund) and CCT programmes in other countries.The key research questions to be answered are:1. How does EMA receipt status influence higher education participation and degree attainment? Is theimpact of EMA explained further by individual background characteristics?2. Does the impact of 16 to 19 Bursary Fund differs from the impact of EMA?3. What are the effects of CCTs on educational attainment in other countries?