Role models: aspirations of vulnerable mothers. A field experiment with Ajuda de Mãe

• Autor(a) principal: Vasconcelos, Joana Francisca Pereira da Silva Jacome de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/133148
• topic: Aspirations; Role model; Disadvantaged mothers; Wages; Jobs; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Aspirations and expectations are important to set future-oriented behavior and to escape poverty. We conducted a remote randomized field experiment in the Fall of 2020 with underprivileged mothers enrolled in the Lisbon-based NGO Ajuda de Mãe to evaluate whether a role model’s intervention can raise these women’s aspirations. We measured the aspirations for socio-economic dimensions such as: job stability, future wages, and jobs and compared our sample with two representative ones that confirm that we are indeed dealing with a rather underprivileged population. The main results show that, those in the treated group increased their wages expectations in five years by 23%and were also more likely to change and “upgrade” their aspired job. This paper adds to the literature not only by conducting this sort of intervention remotely, but also by introducing vulnerable mothers as the research population.