Conditional cash transfers, schooling and child labor : micro-simulating bolsa escola

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design, such as benefit levels or the choice of the means-test, on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. This paper proposes a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior, based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil’s recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, we find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of current poverty and inequality levels.

The causal effect of family size on child labor and education

This paper investigates the causal relationship between family size and child labor and education among brazilian children. More especifically, it analyzes the impact of family size on child labor, school attendance, literacy and school progression. It explores the exogenous variation in family size driven by the presence of twins in the family. The results are consistent under the reasonable assumption that the instrument is a random event. Using the nationally representative brazilian household survey (Pnad), detrimental effects are found on child labor for boys. Moreover, significant effects are obtained for school progression for girls caused by the exogenous presence of the young siblings in the household.

The long-term effects of conditional cash transfers on child labor and school enrollment

This paper investigates the long-term e ects of conditional cash transfers on school attainment and child labor. To this end, we construct a dynamic heterogeneous agent model, calibrate it with Brazilian data, and introduce a policy similar to the Brazilian Bolsa Fam lia. Our results suggest that this type of policy has a very strong impact on educational outcomes, sharply increasing primary school completion. The conditional transfer is also able to reduce the share of working children from 22% to 17%. We then compute the transition to the new steady state and show that the program actually increases child labor over the short run, because the transfer is not enough to completely cover the schooling costs, so children have to work to be able to comply with the program's schooling eligibility requirement. We also evaluate the impacts on poverty, inequality, and welfare.

Property rights as a public policy tool: an empirical analysis of the social and economic effects

Secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development. However, the evaluation of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task. The Brazilian government through a program called "Papel Passado" has issued titles, since 2004, to over 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000. Furthermore, another topic in Public Policy that is crucial to developing economies is income generation and child labor force participation. Particularly, in Brazil, about 5.4 million children and teenagers between 5 and 17 years old are still working. This thesis examines the direct impact of securing a property title on income and child labor force participation. In order to isolate the causal role of ownership security, this study uses a comparison between two close and very similar communities in the City of Osasco case (a town with 650,000 people in the São Paulo metropolitan area). One of them, Jardim Canaã, was fortunated to receive the titles in 2007, the other, Jardim DR, given fiscal constraints, only will be part of the program schedule in 2012, and for that reason became the control group. Also, this thesis also aims to test if there is any relationship between land title and happiness. The estimates suggest that titling results in a substantial decrease of child labor force participation, increase of income and happiness for the families that received the title compared to the others.