Wealthy, healthy and wise: does money compensate for being born into difficult conditions?

摘要

Recent studies have linked transfers from Mexican conditional cash transfer programme Oportunidades (formerly PROGRESA) to improvements in child development (Fernald et al., 2008, 2009), but this work has been criticized as failing to account for endogeneity of the transfers. We create an exogenous instrument for the amount of transfers and use it to test programme and transfer effects. Applying the new instrument confirms that improvements in child development are more linked to the transfers themselves than to other portions of the programme, which involve medical check-ups as well as educational sessions for mothers.