How Ending a Conditional Cash Transfer Program Impacts Children’s School Enrollment: Evidence from Mexico

This research will study the effects of the recent elimination of the pioneering Mexican conditional cash transfer (Prospera) on children’s school enrollment in the months following this policy change. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link monetary transfers to poor households to children’s human capital investment and were first pioneered in Mexico and Brazil two decades ago, now operating in more than 60 mostly developing countries. Mexico’s program Prospera (previously named Progresa / Oportunidades) initial randomized evaluation led to many published studies in leading social science journals which contributed to both a scale up within Mexico with 7 million beneficiary households and the spread of its key features to new programs around the world. This policy change allows an opportunity to study how a population reacts to the sudden elimination of an anti-poverty program which many beneficiary families had received for approximately two decades. In particular, will the gains in schooling which the program had achieved among poor households be reversed or lowered in the current generation or will school enrollment remain unchanged in spite of families losing an important income source and no longer being required to enroll their children in school to qualify ?