1,721,045 research outputs found
Child education and work choices in the presence of a conditional cash transfer programme in rural Colombia
Full text linkThe paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer programme implemented in rural areas in Colombia in 2002, on school enrolment and child labour. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our methodology makes use of an interesting feature of the data, which allows us to identify anticipation effects. Our results show that the programme increased school participation of 14 to 17 year old children quite substantially, by between 5 and 7 percentage points, and had lower, but non-negligible effects on enrolment of younger children of between around 1.5 and 2.5 percentage points. In terms of work, the effects are generally largest for younger children whose participation in domestic work decreased by around 10 to 12 percentage points after the programme but whose participation in income-generating work remained largely unaffected by the programme. We also find evidence of school and work time not being fully substitutable, suggesting that some, but not all, of the increased time at school may be drawn from children's leisure time.
Early identification of at-risk youth in Latin America : an application of cluster analysis
Full text linkA new literature on the nature of and policies for youth in Latin America is emerging, but there is still very little known about who are the most vulnerable young people. This paper aims to characterize the heterogeneity in the youth population and identify ex ante the youth that are at-risk and should be targeted with prevention programs. Using non-parametric methodologies and specialized youth surveys from Mexico and Chile, the authors quantify and characterize the different sub-groups of youth, according to the amount of risk in their lives, and find that approximately 20 percent of 18 to 24 year old Chileans and 40 percent of the same age cohort in Mexico are suffering the consequences of a range of negative behaviors. Another 8 to 20 percent demonstrate factors in their lives that pre-dispose them to becoming at-risk youth - they are the candidates for prevention programs. The analysis finds two observable variables that can be used to identify which children have a higher probability of becoming troubled youth: poverty and residing in rural areas. The analysis also finds that risky behaviors increase with age and differ by gender, thereby highlighting the need for program and policy differentiation along these two demographic dimensions.Adolescent Health,Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Population Policies,Gender and Health
Business training and female enterprise start-up, growth, and dynamics : experimental evidence from Sri Lanka
Full text linkWe conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact
of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-
Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. We work with two representative groups of women: random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises and a random sample of women who
are out of the labor force but interested in starting a business. We track impacts of two treatments
– training only and training plus a cash grant – over two years with four follow-up surveys and
find that the short- and medium-term impacts differ. For women already in business, training
alone leads to some changes in business practices but has no impact on business profits, sales or
capital stock. In contrast the combination of training and a grant leads to large and significant
improvements in business profitability in the first eight months, but this impact dissipates in the
second year. For women interested in starting enterprises, we find that business training speeds
up entry but leads to no increase in net business ownership by our final survey round. Both
profitability and business practices of the new entrants are increased by training, suggesting
training may be more effective for new owners than for existing businesses. We also find that the
two treatments have selection effects, leading to entrants being less analytically skilled and
poorer
Migration, violence and welfare programmes in rural Colombia
Full text linkThis paper studies migration decisions of very poor households in an environment with a high level of violence. By matching detailed retrospective data on violence levels in Colombian rural municipalities with a household survey collected for the evaluation of the "Familias en Acción" welfare programme, the empirical analysis takes into account possible selection problems of the sample and the key issue of endogeneity of violence. The main results show that high levels of violence encourage households to leave their municipality of residence but that welfare programmes may mitigate these flows, provided that the incidence of violence is not unduly high. This is consistent with the fact that the households under study are liquidity constrained: when violence is high, cash transfers may enable them to leave their municipality of residence, whereas, in more normal circumstances, receiving cash transfers increases the benefits to stay where they are registered. Further evidence using household shocks and wealth confirm that liquidity constraints play a large role in explaining such heterogeneous impacts of the programme along violence levels. Other important determinants of migration are the type of property rights and the health insurance rural households can benefit from.migration, welfare programme, violence, displacement, Colombia
Conditional Cash Transfers in Education Design Features, Peer and Sibling Effects Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia
Full text linkWe evaluate multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries -- the conditional cash transfer (CCT) -- with a student level randomization that allows us to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. We test three treatments: a basic CCT treatment based on school attendance, a savings treatment that postpones a bulk of the cash transfer due to good attendance to just before children have to reenroll, and a tertiary treatment where some of the transfers are conditional on students' graduation and tertiary enrollment rather than attendance. On average, the combined incentives increase attendance, pass rates, enrollment, graduation rates, and matriculation to tertiary institutions. Changing the timing of the payments does not change attendance rates relative to the basic treatment but does significantly increase enrollment rates at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Incentives for graduation and matriculation are particularly effective, increasing attendance and enrollment at secondary and tertiary levels more than the basic treatment. We find some evidence that the subsidies can cause a reallocation of responsibilities within the household. Siblings (particularly sisters) of treated students work more and attend school less than students in families that received no treatment. We also find that indirect peer influences are relatively strong in attendance decisions with the average magnitude similar to that of the direct effect.
Conditional cash transfers in education : design features, peer and sibling effects evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia
Full text linkThis paper presents an evaluation of multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries - the conditional cash transfer - with a student level randomization that allows the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. The analysis tests three treatments: a basic conditional cash transfer treatment based on school attendance, a savings treatment that postpones a bulk of the cash transfer due to good attendance to just before children have to re-enroll, and a tertiary treatment where some of the transfers are conditional on students'graduation and tertiary enrollment rather than attendance. On average, the combined incentives increase attendance, pass rates, enrollment, graduation rates, and matriculation to tertiary institutions. Changing the timing of the payments does not change attendance rates relative to the basic treatment but does significantly increase enrollment rates at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Incentives for graduation and matriculation are particularly effective, increasing attendance and enrollment at secondary and tertiary levels more than the basic treatment. There is some evidence that the subsidies can cause a reallocation of responsibilities within the household. Siblings (particularly sisters) of treated students work more and attend school less than students in families that received no treatment. In addition, indirect peer influences are relatively strong in attendance decisions with the average magnitude similar to that of the direct effect.Tertiary Education,Access to Finance,Primary Education,Secondary Education,Economics of Education
Risk, education and child labour in Indonesia
Full text linkWe study the effects of risk and uncertainty on education in Indonesia. Households that face more uncertainty, and that have limited or no access to formal insurance, will have a higher motive for self-insurance and this may have adverse consequences for investment in child education. A key contribution of the paper is to decompose risk into village- and household-level components, and to estimate whether they have different effects on education. We find no evidence of household risk affecting child education, however there is evidence that village risk adversely affects investment in education
Are boys and girls affected differently when the household head leaves for good? Evidence from school and work choices in Colombia
Full text linkThis paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that households that experience the departure of the head are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those that do not, and we also address the issue of non-random attrition from the panel. We find remarkably different effects for boys and girls. For boys, the adverse event reduces school participation and increases participation in paid work, whereas for girls we find evidence of the adverse event having a beneficial impact on schooling. To explain these differences, we provide evidence for boys consistent with the head's departure having an important effect through the income reduction associated with it, whereas for girls, changes in the household decision-maker appear to play an important role.Child labour; schooling; adverse event; income loss; credit and insurance market failures; bargaining
Empirically probing the quantity-quality model
Full text linkThis paper tests whether family size has a causal effect on girls' education in Mexico. It exploits son preference as the main source of random variation in the propensity to have more children, and estimates causal effects using instrumental variables. Overall, it finds no evidence of family size having an adverse effect on education, once the endogeneity of family size is accounted for. Results are robust to another commonly used instrument in this literature, the occurrence of twin births. A divisive concern throughout this literature is that the instruments are invalid, so that inferences including policy recommendations may be misleading. An important contribution of this paper is to allow for the possibility that the instruments are invalid and to provide an answer to the question of just how much the assumption of instrument exogeneity drives findings. It concludes that the assumption of exogeneity does not affect the results that much, and the effects of family size on girls' schooling remain extremely modest at most.
The onset of mental health disparities in sexual minority and majority youth: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study
No full textA comparison of parent reported childhood mental health trajectories (Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire) across self-reported sexual identity at age 17 in the Millennium Cohort Study
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