Description:

Jimmy Lee (Northwestern University): "Conventional Roles, Beliefs, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Agricultural Innovations: Preliminary Evidence, Theory, and a Field Experiment in Liberia"

Abstract: As the youth population and school enrollment continue to rise in sub-Saharan Africa, school programs that provide practical life skills are increasingly common. Such programs can cost-effectively diffuse new knowledge into households. However, students conventionally assist their elders in many household decisions. A reversal of roles is required for students to teach their elders new practices. Unaware of skills that students have learnt in schools, elders are skeptical that students have valuable knowledge. Students, knowing that elders are skeptical, might be reluctant to engage in discussions of what they have learnt. This paper studies these informational barriers to intergenerational transmission of innovations in the context of a school-based agricultural education program in Liberia. I construct a novel game that highlights inefficiencies in communication when (i) an information friction hindering one player’s update on the state of nature is commonly known to both parties; (ii) costs of communication and/or sanctions for violating prevailing norms necessitate coordination between players; and (iii) players form beliefs with reference to conventional roles. I design a field experiment to separately identify biases in the reduced-form beliefs of students and their elders, to test policy-relevant informational treatments, and to measure their effects on the flow of agricultural innovations and production patterns within households.

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