Research 1

We measure the effect of a large nationwide tax reform on sugar-added drinks and caloric-dense food introduced in Mexico in 2014. Using scanner data containing weekly purchases of 47,973 barcodes by 8,130 households and an RD design, we find that calories purchased from taxed drinks and taxed food decreased respectively by 2.7% and 3%. However, this was compensated by increases from untaxed categories, such that total calories purchased did not change. We find increases in cholesterol (12.6%), sodium (5.8%), saturated fat (3.1%), carbohydrates (2%), and proteins (3.8%)

Infrastructure and human capital limitations motivate the design of mHealth
programs, but their large-scale implementation may be challenging in a development context.
Prospera Digital (PD) is a pilot mHealth intervention aiming to improve maternal and child health
and nutrition designed as a randomized controlled trial with 3 treatment arms. It was
implemented during 2015–2017 in 326 treatment clinics located in 5 states in Mexico. : Co-ordination between the Health and Social Development ministries was adequate,
although some health providers were not informed about PD. Program developers added useful
implementation strategies during roll-out to reinforce sign-up events. Key quality facilitators were
the clarity and relevance of the messages from the short messages service. Beneficiaries
expressed high satisfaction with PD. In contrast, implementation barriers to adherence in some
localities might reduce the potential impact of PD. Program differentiation was low between the
3 treatment arms

A number of studies document gender differentials in agricultural productivity. However, they are limited to region and crop-specific estimates of the mean gender gap. This article improves on previous work in three ways. First, data representative at the national level and for a wide variety of crops is exploited. Second, decomposition methods—traditionally used in the analysis of wage gender gaps—are employed. Third, heterogeneous effects by women’s marital status and along the productivity distribution are analyzed. Drawing on data from the 2011–2012 Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey, we find an overall 23.4 percentage point productivity differential in favor of men, of which 13.5 percentage points (57%) remain unexplained after accounting for gender differences in land manager characteristics, land attributes, and access to resources. The magnitude of the unexplained fraction is large relative to prior estimates in the literature. A more detailed analysis suggests that differences in the returns to extension services, land certification, land extension, and product diversification may contribute to the unexplained fraction. Moreover, the productivity gap is mostly driven by non-married female managers—particularly divorced women—; married female managers do not display a disadvantage. Finally, overall and unexplained gender differentials are more pronounced at mid-levels of productivity.

The selection of beneficiaries in public policy is a central issue in economics, as it involves
the efficient allocation of scarce resources. This paper analyzes key targeting strategies using PROBEMS, a cash transfer program for high school students in Mexico. We examine
three dimensions of beneficiary selection. First, we compare two allocation mechanisms: a
centralized system based on a proxy-means test and a decentralized school-based ranking
process. We find that school rankings prioritize academic merit over poverty, with a moderate risk of resource capture. Second, we examine how misreporting affects the centralized
system. It not only distorts poverty indicators but also changes the weight assigned to specific assets in the proxy-means algorithm. Third, we apply machine learning methods to
assess how targeting would differ if the program prioritized outcomes rather than need, as
is typical with proxy-means tests. Relative to the centralized proxy-means test, we estimate
that recipient assignments would differ by 40% under school-based rankings, 49% using
corrected data, and 39% with outcome-based machine learning targeting. These results
underscore the tradeoffs between accuracy, fairness, and manipulation risk when targeting
social programs.

We study distributional and educational impacts of shifting from means-tested to semi-universal
antipoverty programs, leveraging a natural experiment in Mexico. In 2019, the Mexican program
PROGRESA was replaced by the semi-universal Benito Juarez Scholarships (BBJ), resulting in an
eligibility base expansion at the cost of transfer amounts. We give evidence that this resource
reallocation was regressive, but that the marginal households that benefited from the new targeting
strategy might display educational benefits. Using a difference-in-differences and a regression
discontinuity design, we employ a variation in the BBJ targeting design to compare a semi-universal
to a proxy-means strategy. Employing administrative and survey information, we focus on the basic
education level since BBJ employs both targeting strategies at this level. Our DiD findings suggest
that the semi-universal targeting reduces dropout rates by 0.76 percentage points at the elementary
level, while having non-significant reductions in middle school. Our RDD estimates do not display
significant changes.

This paper studies how a conditional cash transfer program with an embedded healthcare
component might induce relevant tradeoffs. By improving a previously employed identification
that exploits a sharp discontinuity in progresa’s initial locality-level rollout, we estimate a
sizable 12% increase in outpatient visits at public clinics, mainly driven by children and adults
aged 20-49. This translates into improvements in reproductive healthcare and screenings for
chronic diseases. While the attendance of non-targeted elderly members is not affected, the
program does seem to impose costs by increasing congestion and reducing self-reported quality.
This suggests that the benefits of this policy lever may carry negative unintended effects to the
non-beneficiary population.

This paper studies the consequences of a human error during the school choice mechanism of
Mexico City public high school system. Using the reported rank-ordered lists of the applicants,
we estimate their indirect utilities and generate cardinal measures of the error’s impact on the
applicants’ utilities. In particular, we found that the median welfare change is negatively correlated
with the educations of the applicants’ mothers (proxy for socioeconomic level).

The long-term effects of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, PROSPERA, on poor households are of great interest to both policymakers and academics. This paper analyzes the long-term effects on the welfare of the original participating households and their descendants, approximately 20 years after the program’s inception. To complement other studies that analyze effects on education and health, this analysis focuses on a utilitarian definition of welfare and employs two empirical strategies. The first uses the 1997–2000 experiment as the cleanest source of variation, although it is limited. The analysis shows that, by 2017–2018, the descendants of the original beneficiary families are more likely to form their own households, to migrate to different localities, and to have more durable goods and higher consumption expenditure than their control counterparts. The second strategy confirms and expands these findings using a difference-in-differences methodology that exploits the program’s expansion across localities and the age of individuals as sources of variation. This second approach covers a much broader and more representative sample and captures information on self-reported vulnerability regarding food consumption. The results confirm the overall positive outlook in terms of durable goods and reduced food vulnerability. Perhaps most interesting and relevant for evaluating the program’s success is that it improved intergenerational mobility. Using the 1997–2000 experiment, the analysis shows that young adults who benefited improved in terms of education, asset ownership, and income relative to their parents. It appears that the descendants of the original beneficiaries are improving their relative position in terms of assets and income.

Access to information is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to achieve health improvements. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of four interventions that seek to improve maternal and early childhood health outcomes. The interventions being evaluated focus on empowering, motivating and providing behaviorally-designed messages delivered to beneficiaries by SMS. This paper (the first of a series) investigates the impact of the program on women’s knowledge about adequate care practices, which is a key mechanism to achieve health improvements. For such purpose, an original battery of 21 questions was designed, gathered and analyzed. To assess the impact on knowledge, we compared the responses of two sets of women: one group had already received a key piece of information (through SMS), while the other were still about to receive it. By comparing both groups we find a 12 percent increase in the proportion of correct answers as a result of the information delivery. Interestingly, an intervention focused on framing messages by adding motivationally-charged content achieves an increase in knowledge even before receiving the information, but is later caught up by the rest of the interventions.

This paper empirically examines the educational selectivity of United States immigrants and of those that return to their source country. Data from the 1970 to 2000 U.S. Census and the 2010 American Community Survey are employed. Ten countries are selected for the study based on their historical and contemporaneous importance on U.S. migration. The results generally indicate positive selection on educational attainment of recently-arrived immigrants, being China, India, and Philippines the most prominent examples. Mexico does not show evidence of positive or negative selection, but their immigrants’ selectivity has worsened through time. Historically, the educational selectivity of returning migrants accentuated the positive selection of those migrants that stay in the United States in most countries’ cases. However, patterns of selection among migrants that stay have recently changed. A more detailed analysis with data from the last decade finds evidence of positive selection of immigrants staying in the U.S. for the Mexican and Philippines’ case, as well as negative selection for the Chinese. Trends of returning migration are also analyzed by gender, age, naturalization status, and migration spell duration. Mixed evidence of selection trends is found.

There has been a recent research growth in the intersection between health and
behavioral economics. Some of this research has looked into the importance of the
framing of the information delivered. Most of this work has focused on emphasizing the
positive or negative effects of specific behaviors (e.g. quit smoking, improve diet, take a
specific treatment, etc.). In this trial we will test framing in a different sense: encouraging
beneficiaries to increase their effort without referring to the benefits or detriments of not
following a specific action. As part of a government pilot program called Prospera Digital,
pregnant women and mothers with babies less than two years old receive personalized
SMS with healthcare information. Our trial consists on making a small variation to the pilot
program with the objective of measuring the influence of motivational and socio-emotional
content (MSE content) on women’s behavior and their babies health outcomes. Two
sets of messages have been designed: (i) the first set of messages, the control arm,
removes most MSE content possible from the government trial program without affecting
the knowledge that the messages intend to transmit; (ii) the second set, the treatment arm,
exacerbates the MSE content without adding healthcare information

This project seeks to improve maternal health, birth outcomes and early child
development, by empowering mothers through a SMS information system. The SMS
information system is targeted at beneficiaries of Prospera, Mexico’s conditional cash
transfer programme (formerly known as Progresa and Oportunidades). The SMS
information system consists of appointment reminders, prompts to plan for birth and
emergencies, information on potential concerns, and preventative health care advice.
SMS are sent in a personalized manner using administrative information, medical records
and the responses from the beneficiaries to SMS. The two-way system also allows
beneficiaries to seek emergency care, report health concerns and change their regular
appointments.
Three treatments variations will be evaluated with a randomized control trial (RCT)
design. The first treatment arm will test the impact of the two-way information system. The
second variation will test the SMS system with additional messages from local community
members. Finally, the third group will test the SMS system with the additional component
of enabling beneficiaries to provide feedback on the health services received. The
feedback collected on the quality of the clinic services will be later used to provide
incentives to clinic personnel.
Rigorous evidence about potential changes in habits, knowledge, health service demand,
anthropometrics and developmental outcomes will be explored.