Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioral Model of Child Schooling and Fertility: Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico

Petra Todd and Kenneth Wolpin ()
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Kenneth Wolpin: Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: This paper studies the performance of a methodology that can be used to evaluate the impact of new policies that radically depart from existing ones. It uses data gathered from a randomized schooling subsidy experiment in Mexico (i) to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, (ii) to forecast long-term program impacts that extend beyond the life of the experiment, and (iii) to assess the impact of a variety of counterfactual policies. The behavioral model is estimated using data on families in the randomized-out control group and in the treatment group prior to the experiment, both of which did not receive any subsidy. Child wages provide a valuable source of variation in the data for identifying subsidy effects. Using the estimated model, we predict the effects of school subsidies according to the schedule that was implemented under the Mexican PROGRESA program.

Keywords: schooling; child labor; fertility; structural estimation; social experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2002-04-01, Revised 2003-09-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:03-022

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