CCT programs have become the anti-poverty program of choice in many developing countries. Numerous evaluations, often based on rigorous experimental designs, leave little doubt that such programs can increase enrollment and grades attained--in the short term. But evidence is notably lacking on...

The effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development, labor market outcomes and well-being. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the first 1,000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical...

Longitudinal household data can have considerable advantages over much morewidely used cross-sectional data. The collection of longitudinal data, however, may bedifficult and expensive. One problem that has concerned many analysts is that sampleattrition may make the interpretation of estimates...

Panel (or longitudinal) data often provide an understanding of the dynamicbehavior of individual households not possible with cross-sectional or time-seriesinformation alone. However, a disturbing feature of this type of survey in both developedand developing countries is that there is often...

Most empirical investigations of the effects of cognitive skills assume that they are produced by schooling. Drawing on longitudinal data to estimate production functions for adult verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills, we find that: (1) School attainment has a significant and substantial effect...

We review the literature on the long-term impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America. Long-term impacts are defined as those that both: 1) are related to the accumulation of human capital, and; 2) are observed after beneficiary children have reached a later stage of the...