Biblioteca

This paper examines the effects of providing information about the future benefits of schooling through the airing of a short telenovela titled “Decidiendo para un Futuro Mejor” (Deciding for a Better Future, hereafter DFM) on national television during the COVID-19 pandemic in Peru. DFM uses videos to highlight the advantages of education while providing concrete information on wages and financial aid opportunities for higher education. We evaluate the impact of this intervention on dropout rates in 2021 using a randomized encouragement design with a sample of over 80,000 families with high school students. The intervention involved phone calls to promote watching television during the broadcast of DFM videos. Our findings indicate that the encouragement led to a significant reduction in school dropout rates, with intention-to-treat effects of approximately -0.6 percentage points, which is substantial given the average dropout rate of 10.2% in the control group. The effects are stronger for students from schools with higher baseline dropout and poverty rates. Additionally, we find larger effects for girls, with no observable differences based on parental education levels. Suggestive evidence indicates that the observed effects are not primarily driven by the direct impact of the phone calls but rather by the encouragement to watch DFM. These results highlight the potential of cost-effective strategies to mitigate the adverse effects of major negative shocks on educational trajectories.