Education choices in Mexico: using a structural model and a randomised experiment to evaluate Progresa

By C. Meghir, Ana Santiago. 2004

490 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we use an economic model to analyse data from a major social experiment, namely PROGRESA in Mexico, and to evaluate its impact on school participation. In the process we also show the usefulness of using experimental data to estimate a structural economic model. The evaluation sample includes data from villages where the program was implemented and where it was not. The allocation was randomised for evaluation purposes. We estimate a structural model of education choices and argue that without such a framework it is impossible to evaluate the effect of the program and, especially, possible changes to its structure. We also argue that the randomized component of the data allows us to identify a more flexible model that is better suited to evaluate the program. We find that the program has a positive effect on the enrollment of children, especially after primary school; this result is well replicated by the parsimonious structural model. We also find that a revenue neutral change in the program that would increase the grant for secondary school children while eliminating for the primary school children would have a substantially larger effect on enrollment of the latter, while having minor effects on the former.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68a413b4456505e20ad2bed567f36d48e0b76b55

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Citations in the corpus

Educational Impacts and Cost-Effectiveness of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis (2017, background): “For example, Attanasio et al. (2010) reports for Colombia’s Familias en Accion, impact estimates for primary enrollment separately for rural girls, rural boys, urban girls, and urban boys—but not an aggregate primary enrollment effect.”
Field experiments in labor economics (2010, background): “Another example is Attanasio et al. (2009) who combine household data on social”
The Demand for Energy-Using Assets among the World's Rising Middle Classes (2016, background): “While the existing literature documents the existence of S-shaped cross-sectional correlations, we provide a model to explain it, and show that the relationship is indeed causal.”
Evaluating Anti-Poverty Programs (2005, methodology): “For example, by combining a randomized evaluation design with a structural model of education choices, Attanasio et al. (2004) are able to greatly expand the set of policy-relevant questions about the design of PROGRESA that a conventional evaluation can answer.”