This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

We estimate the contemporaneous effect of education on adolescent crime by exploiting the variation in crime rates between different cohorts and at different ages that followed a reform that raised the school-leaving age in Italy. A 1 percentage-point increase of the enrollment rate reduces...

The paper estimates the impact on school attendance and child labor of conditional cash payments to poor families in Brazil. It describes Brazil's transfer programs and presents statistics on school attendance and child labor. In the second half of the 1990s, many municipalities had adopted the...

We investigate the effect of education Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) on teenage pregnancy. Our main concern is with how the size and sign of the eect may depend on the design of the program. Using a simple model we show that an education CCT that conditions renewal on school...

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to identify the effect of Head...

Childcare coverage for children under four years of age has increased considerably in Latin America and the Caribbean. This expansion was aimed at facilitating women’s labor force participation. Emphasis in quality services during the first years of life is essential. This document presents...

This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I compare siblings who differ in their participation in the program, controlling for a variety of pre-treatment covariates. I estimate that Head Start participants gain 0.23...

This paper presents findings from an experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation’s largest training program for disadvantaged youths. The study uses survey data collected over four years and tax data over nine years on a nationwide sample of 15,400 treatments and controls. The Job Corps...

The present paper first discusses and evaluates the educational and family policy measures mentioned in the coalition agreement of the CDU-FDP coalition government. As research in educational and family economics has shown, early childhood education and care is extremely important for both of...