Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Conditional Cash Transfers on Human Capital: Evidence from Colombia
By J. Baez, Adriana Camacho. Social Science Research Network, 2011
140 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Conditional cash transfers are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. Although there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about the long-term impacts of the programs on human capital. This paper investigates whether cohorts of children from poor households that benefited up to nine years from Familias en Accion, a conditional cash transfer program in Colombia, attained more school and performed better on academic tests at the end of high school. Identification of program impacts is derived from two different strategies using matching techniques with household surveys, and regression discontinuity design using a census of the poor and administrative records of the program. The authors show that, on average, participant children are 4 to 8 percentage points more likely than nonparticipant children to finish high school, particularly girls and beneficiaries in rural areas. Regarding long-term impact on tests scores, the analysis shows that program recipients who graduate from high school seem to perform at the same level as equally poor non-recipient graduates, even after correcting for possible selection bias when low-performing students enter school in the treatment group. Although the positive impacts on high school graduation may improve the employment and earning prospects of participants, the lack of positive effects on test scores raises the need to further explore policy actions to couple the program's objective of increasing human capital with enhanced learning.
Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32244e9c5324271a782b3e21e53a6017930ae2c7
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Nutrition and Dietetics
In Safety Research
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Long-Term Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers: Review of the Evidence (2019, methodology): “The authors combine program participation data with national administrative records on secondary school graduation exams (the same data source used by Baez and Camacho (2011)) after eight years, and administrative data on enrollment in tertiary institutions eight and twelve years after the start of ”
- When the money runs out: Do cash transfers have sustained effects on human capital accumulation? (2016, unknown): “…gains in terms of learning, employment, and income are limited or non- existent as they become young women (Araujo, Bosch and Schady 2016; Baez and Camacho 2011; Barham, Macours and Maluccio 2013; Behrman, Parker and Todd 2011; Filmer and 4 We use capabilities and functionings as…”
- The Impact of Cash Transfers: A Review of the Evidence from Low- and Middle-income Countries (2018, background): “Cash transfer programmes covered and number of studies from which evidence was extracted Country Programme Type of programme Years of operation Coverage at latest count Number of studies Latin America & Caribbean Bolivia Bonosol/Bolivida pension1 Social pension 1997–present 800,000 individuals (2010”