Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer Program Research Articles

Doubly robust estimation of multivariate fractional outcome means with multivalued treatments

. This article suggests a doubly robust method of estimating potential outcome means for multivariate fractional outcomes when the treatment of interest is unconfounded and can take more than two values. The method involves maximizing a propensity score weighted multinomial quasi-log-likelihood function with a multinomial logit conditional mean. We show that this estimator, which we call weighted multivariate fractional logit (wmflogit), consistently estimates the potential outcome means if either the propensity score model or the conditional mean model is misspecified. Our simulations demonstrate this double robustness property for the case of shares generated using a Dirichlet distribution. Finally, we advocate for the use of wmflogit by applying it to estimate time-use shares of women participating in the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Progresa, using Stata’s fmlogit command developed by Buis.

Inference on Optimal Treatment Assignments

We consider inference on optimal treatment assignments. Our methods allow for inference on the treatment assignment rule that would be optimal given knowledge of the population treatment eect in a general setting. The procedure uses multiple hypothesis testing methods to determine a subset of the population for which assignment to treatment can be determined to be optimal after conditioning on all available information, with a prespecied level of condence. A monte carlo study conrms that the inference procedure has good small sample behavior. We apply the method to study the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Progresa.

Living longer: The effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program on elderly mortality

With both an aging population and a transition from communicable to chronic diseases, the health of the elderly is a growing issue in many developing countries. Conditional cash transfer programs are usually thought to benefit young people, but may also benefit other age groups since some programs require that all household members have regular preventive health check-ups. This paper exploits the phasing-in of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Progresa, between 1997 and 2000, and shows a 4% decline in average, municipality-level mortality for people aged 65 and older. The program not only reduced deaths due to more traditional infectious diseases, but also diabetes related deaths. Given that diabetes deaths are a leading cause of death in Mexico, and in the top 10 causes of death in many high- and middle-income countries, this is an important finding.

Scaling up Maternal Nutrition Programs to Improve Birth Outcomes: A Review of Implementation Issues

Maternal nutrition interventions are efficacious in improving birth outcomes. It is important to demonstrate that if delivered in field conditions they produce improvements in health and nutrition. Analyses of scaling-up of five program implemented in several countries. These include micronutrient supplementation, food fortification, food supplements, nutrition education and counseling, and conditional cash transfers (as a platform for delivering interventions). Evidence on impact and cost-effectiveness is assessed, especially on achieving high, equitable, and sustained coverage, and reasons for success or failure Systematic review of articles on large-scale programs in several databases. Two separate reviewers carried out independent searches. A separate review of the gray literature was carried out including websites of the most important organizations leading with these programs. With Google Scholar a detailed review of the 100 most frequently cited references on each of the five above topics was conducted. Food fortification programs: iron and folic acid fortification were less successful than salt iodization initiatives, as the latter attracted more advocacy. Micronutrient supplementation programs: Nicaragua and Nepal achieved good coverage. Key elements of success are antenatal care coverage, ensuring availability of tablets, and improving compliance. Integrated nutrition programs in India, Bangladesh, and Madagascar with food supplementation and/or behavioral change interventions report improved coverage and behaviors, but achievements are below targets. The Mexican conditional cash transfer program provides a good example of use of this platform to deliver maternal nutritional interventions. Programs differ in complexity, and key elements for success vary with the type of program and the context in which they operate. Special attention must be given to equity, as even with improved overall coverage and impact inequalities may even be increased. Finally, much greater investments are needed in independent monitoring and evaluation.

The Impact of Oportunidades on Inequality of Opportunity in Rural and Urban Areas in Mexico

The analysis of inequality of opportunity has become an important issue in recent economic literature, especially in Latin America. This study proposes a link to the capability approach and analyzes the performance of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades in terms of inequality of opportunity. A MIMIC framework is used to estimate children's latent development capabilities and their dependence on family background variables. The results suggest that Oportunidades increases overall capabilities and is able to reduce significantly the dependence of capabilities on circumstances, mostly family background variables, hence reducing inequality of opportunity. The findings of this study suggest that the use of conditional cash transfer programs might be a very useful tool to reduce inequality of opportunity.

A healthier start: The effect of conditional cash transfers on neonatal and infant mortality in rural Mexico

Conditional cash transfer programs seek to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by building the human capital of poor children. Despite their popularity throughout the developing world, relatively little is known about their effect on children's health outcomes. This paper evaluates the impact of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Progresa, on two important health outcomes: infant and neonatal mortality. It exploits the phasing-in of Progresa over time throughout rural Mexico to identify the impact of the program. The paper shows that Progresa led to a large 17% decline in rural infant mortality among the treated, but did not reduce neonatal mortality on average. The benefit–cost ratio is between 1.3 and 3.6. Tests for heterogeneity show larger declines for some groups including those municipalities whose pre-program levels of mortality were above the median, and those that prior to the program had higher illiteracy rates, and less access to electricity.

Oportunidades: Program Effect on Consumption, Low Participation, and Methodological Issues

In this paper we estimate the effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on consumption, and we explore some issues related to participation in the program and to the estimation of treatment effects. We discuss the comparability of treatment and control areas, provide evidence that the expected transfer may not be sufficiently high to induce many eligible households to participate, and find positive effects on consumption.

Schooling Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers on Young Children: Evidence from Mexico.

This paper evaluates impacts of Oportunidades, a Mexican conditional cash transfer program, on educational outcomes 5.5 years after program initiation for a group of children who were age 0 to 8 years pre-program. The oldest children within this age range received educational scholarships. The youngest children did not receive the scholarships because they had not yet started the third grade of school (the initial grade for scholarships), but were beneficiaries of the program's health components that included nutritional supplements for children 24 months of age or younger. All of these children also may have benefitted more generally from increased household income resulting from the program. This paper investigates how the program differentially affected younger and older children within this age range and examines whether the early nutritional intervention led to improvements in subsequent educational performance. The program impact estimates are derived from a randomly assigned treatment and control group, which participated for different lengths of time in the program, and from a matched comparison group that had not participated prior to the collection of data in 2003. The empirical findings show positive program impacts on reducing ages at entering school for the younger children as well as on accumulated grades of schooling after 5.5 years of benefits for older children, with estimates implying a 1 percent reduction in the age of entry to primary and an increase in grades of schooling completed to date of about 8 to 9 percent.

Child Care Provision: Semiparametric Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Mexico

We estimate semiparametrically the impact of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades on the time mothers and older sisters spend taking care of children aged under 3, using the randomization of a program placement and the methodology in Lewbel (2000). Results support the existence of substitution effects: mothers in treatment households are more likely to substitute for their older daughters’ time to child care. As a result, daughters devote more time to schooling and less taking care of their younger siblings. Overall, total household time allocated to child care increases. These findings indicate that Oportunidades not only fosters human capital accumulation through keeping teenage girls in school but also through more and arguably better (mother provided) child care.

Oportunidades: Program Effect on Consumption, Low Participation, and Methodological Issues

In this paper we estimate the effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on consumption, and we explore some issues related to participation to the program and to the estimation of treatment effects. We discuss the comparability of treatment and control areas, provide evidence that the expected transfer may not be sufficiently high to induce many eligible households to participate, and find positive effects on consumption.

Heterogeneous impacts in PROGRESA

Abstract We investigate impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental evaluation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA. We build upon, and extend Heckman, Smith and Clements [Heckman, J., Smith, J., Clements, N., 1997. Making the most out of programme evaluations and social experiments: Accounting for heterogeneity in programme impacts. Review of Economic Studies 64, 487–535] and recent studies of quantile treatment effects and random coefficient models. We find strong evidence of systematic (i.e. subgroup) variation in impacts in PROGRESA and modest evidence of heterogeneous impacts conditional on the systematic impacts. Our paper concludes with a discussion of the policy relevance of our findings and of heterogeneous impacts more generally.

Why do Beneficiaries Leave the Safety Net in Mexico? A Study of the Effects of Conditionality on Dropouts

Summary This paper analyzes the characteristics of beneficiaries who drop out of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades to determine if dropping out of the program is a result of self-targeting by the non-poor or the exclusion of the target poor population. Using Oportunidades’ administrative data and a discrete duration model, the analysis indicates that wealthier beneficiaries have greater odds of dropping out, suggesting that conditionality acts as a screening device. The results also indicate that administrative factors and the provider of health services to beneficiaries also have an important influence on whether beneficiaries remain in or leave the program.

Heterogeneous Impacts in PROGRESA

The “common effect” model in program evaluation assumes that all treated individuals have the same impact from a program. Our paper contributes to the recent literature that tests and goes beyond the common effect model by investigating impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental evaluation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA. Our analysis builds upon and extends that in Heckman, Smith and Clements (1997) and more recent studies of quantile treatment effects and random coefficient models. We find strong evidence of systematic (i.e. subgroup) variation in impacts in PROGRESA and modest evidence of heterogeneous impacts conditional on the systematic impacts. We find evidence against the perfect positive dependence assumption that underlies the interpretation of quantile treatment effects as impacts at quantiles of the untreated outcome distribution. Our paper concludes with a discussion of the policy relevance of our findings and of heterogeneous impacts more generally.

Estimating Att Effects with Non-Experimental Data and Low Compliance

In this paper we discuss several methodological issues related to the identification and estimation of Average Treatment on the Treated (ATT) effects in the presence of low compliance. We consider non-experimental data consisting of a treatment group, where a program is implemented, and of a control group that is non-randomly drawn, where the program is not offered. Estimating the ATT involves tackling both the non-random assignment of the program and the non-random participation among treated individuals. We argue against standard matching approaches to deal with the latter issue because they are based on the assumption that we observe all variables that determine both participation and outcome. Instead, we propose an IV-type estimator which exploits the fact that the ATT can be expressed as the Average Intent to Treat divided by the participation share, in the absence of spillover effects. We propose a semi-parametric estimator that couples the flexibility of matching estimators with a standard Instrumental Variable approach. We discuss the different assumptions necessary for the identification of the ATT with each of the two approaches, and we provide an empirical application by estimating the effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on food consumption.

The Mexican Oportunidades Program: Questioning the Linking of Security to Conditional Social Investments for Mothers and Children

The article examines the ways in which the Mexican Oportunidades program, a neo-liberal social investment program, is applied in Mexico. It comments on both the efficacy of the program and the ways in which motherhood and citizenship are redefined. The Oportunidades program is a conditional cash transfer program that provides money for nutrition and educational scholarships to poor mothers on condition that the funds are used toward enhancing their children's human capital development. These conditions are intended to lead to the eventual integration of the children into the market economy as skilled individuals. The article points out how the Mexican conditional cash transfer program has shifted the responsibility for social security from the state to the non-state sector, namely to mothers and families, banks and markets. The investment in children is done through mothers' regulated participation, based on conditions, and designed along gendered, cultural norms of mothering. I argue that the conditional cash transfer system attempts to insert mothers into the market as creditworthy consumers, yet it has inserted them into the economy and into political discourse not as citizens with rights, but as mothers with increased social responsibilities. Furthermore, even if mothers abide by all the conditions and children have access to additional years of schooling, the efficacy of this social investment model is called into question due to the instability of the Mexican economy, the precariousness of work, and high levels of poverty and inequality in Mexico.

Effects on School Enrollment and Performance of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Mexico

We study the effects of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Progresa on school enrollment and performance in passing grades. We develop a theoretical framework of the dynamics of the educational process including endogeneity and uncertainty of school performance. Using a randomized experiment implemented under Progresa, we identify the effect of the program on enrollment and performance in the first year of the program. We find that the program had a positive impact on school enrollment at all grade levels, whereas for performance it had a positive impact at the primary school level but a negative impact at the secondary level.