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Abstract

Students in low-income contexts often lack guidance in their career decisions, which can lead to a misallocation of educational investments. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted with 1715 students in rural Cambodia and show that a half-day career guidance workshop designed to support adolescents in developing occupational aspirations on average increased educational investments. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by baseline student performance. While the workshop increased schooling efforts of high-performing students, treated low-performing students reduced their educational investments. We develop a simple model that explains this treatment effect heterogeneity by baseline performance.