Abstract
We analyze rural household children’s school enrollment decisions in a post-conflict setting in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh. The innovation of the paper lies in the fact that we employ information about current subjective perceptions regarding the possibility of violence in the future and past actual experiences of violence to explain household economic decision-making. Preferences are endogenous in line with behavioral economics. Regression results show that heightened subjective perceptions of future violence and past actual experiences of conflict can increase child enrollment.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the European Union FP 6 MICROCON research project for financial help, and the UNDP in Bangladesh who funded the household survey analyzed in this paper and gave us permission to use the same dataset.
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