The Brazilian Experience with CCTs : Bolsa Familia's impacts on children's schooling and time allocation

The Bolsa Familia (PBF) is a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme that has been in place in Brazil since 2003. Following the main features of other CCTs, in order to receive the cash transfers, the beneficiary families have to comply with the programme’s terms which concern mainly their children’s nutritional, health and educational situation. In this dissertation, I will present the programme’s impacts on children’s school attendance and time allocation between school and labour market activities, obtained from different methods by using the 2006 household survey microdata. The linear probability model, the logit model and the propensity score matching estimations indicate that the participation in the programme increases the probability of school attendance by 2 to 2.9 percentage points for children between 10 and 15 years old. Furthermore, the children in the sample were divided in four groups: ‘only studying’, ‘only working’, ‘studying and working’, and ‘not studying or working’, given that the possibility of combining schooling and work (formal or not) was not excluded completely. The marginal effects calculated with a multinomial logit model indicate that participation in the programme decreases the probability of ‘not studying or working’ and of ‘only working’ by 1.7 and 0.6 percentage points, respectively, and it increases by 1.9 percentage points the probability that the children ‘study and work’