大规模助推：来自巴基斯坦旁遮普省学校停课期间政府短信活动的证据

Policy Research Working Paper Nudging at Scale Evidence from a Government Text Messaging Campaignduring School Shutdowns in Punjab, Pakistan Koen GevenAyesha TahirTazeen FasihJavaeria QureshiAmer HasanSheena FaziliRabea Malik Policy Research Working Paper11286 Abstract Text and voice messages have emerged as a low-cost andpopular tool for nudging recipients to change behavior. Thispaper presents findings from a randomized controlled trialdesigned to evaluate the impact of an information cam-paign using text and voice messages implemented in Punjab,Pakistan during the COVID-19-induced school closures.This campaign sought to increase study time and provideacademic support while schools were closed and to encour-age reenrollment when they opened, to reduce the numberof dropouts. The campaign targeted girls enrolled in grades5 to 7. Messages were sent out by a government institu-tion, and the campaign lasted from October 2020 until treatment arms and received academic support messages(practice math problems and solutions). The results showthat the messages increased reenrollment by 6.0 percentagepoints approximately three months after the interventionfinished. Gender neutral messages (+8.9 percentage points)showed larger effect size on enrolment than gender-specificmessages (+ 4.3 percentage points), although the differenceis not statistically significant. The message program alsoincreased learning outcomes by 0.2 standard deviation forUrdu and 0.2 standard deviation for math. The paper findsa small positive effect on the intensive margin of remote This paper is a product of the Education Global Department. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provideopen access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy ResearchWorking Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those Nudging at Scale: Evidence from a Government Text MessagingCampaign during School Shutdowns in Punjab, Pakistan* Koen Geven1, Ayesha Tahir1, Tazeen Fasih1, Javaeria Qureshi2, Amer Hasan1, Sheena Fazili3, Rabea Malik4,Kevin MacDonald1 Keywords: Education, Gender, Text Messages, Covid-19, ParentingJEL classification: C93, I21, O15, J16 Cleared by: Fadila Cauillaud, Practice Manager, Education Global Practice, MENAAP * The research team would like to express its sincere gratitude to the Government of Punjab, the Punjab School Education Department, theProject Management and Implementation Unit (PMIU) and the Punjab Information and Technology Board (PITB) and to research partnersIDEAS, CERP, ITA and RCons for supporting the implementation of this research project. The team gratefully acknowledges generousfunding from the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) and the South Asia Region Gender Innovation Lab (SAR GIL) at the WorldBank.The team also thanks participants at seminars organized by SIEF, SAR GIL, the Lahore University of Management Sciences 1World Bank2University of Illinois at Chicago, United States3Independent researcher4 1. IntroductionIn Pakistan, social norms regarding gender play a prominent role in households’ schooling decisions (Jacoby & Mansuri, 2011). Policy makers see such norms as a major reason why only 57% of girls areenrolled in primary education, as compared to 64% of boys (Baron et al, 2024). Information can playan important role in conservative contexts like Pakistan because norm perception may not reflectactual behavior. Information can provide a quick pathway to updated beliefs about what constitutesnormal behavior in such contexts, thereby changing the behavior of those receiving the information(Ali & Bénabou, 2020; Burstyn et al, 2020). Importantly, information can travel fast, at low cost and The study leverages COVID-19-related school closures to assess the efficacy of a low-cost behavioralnudge in a context of strong social norms. COVID-19-related school closures led to concerns aboutpotential learning losses very early in the pandemic period (Azevedo et al, 2020). Dropouts fromschool due to the closures were also prominent in several low-income countries (Sabarwal et al, 2023),with the overall level of dropouts observed estimated at 6 percentage points (Flor et al, 2022). Sincethen, empirical work has documented an average learning loss of around 0.14 standard deviation, withmost studies documenting increases in educational inequality (Betthauser et al, 2023). School re-openings only partially recovered these learning losses, leading to continued concerns ab