The ABC of housing strategies: are housing assistance programs effective to enhance children's well being?

This paper examines the effect on school enrollment, child labor and poverty reduction of a ABC strategy (savings-voucher-credit) that provides assistance to poor families in Ecuador to have an own and adequate house. Administrative data is merged to a household panel to link the history of a voucher’s application with socioeconomic information before and after the intervention. To identify an effect two empirical approaches are employed. First, I exploit the variation on time of the different stages involved in obtaining the voucher and converting it into a house to construct comparable treatment and control groups using a sample of approved applicants. Second, I use the variation across siblings within families that arises from the fact that siblings get the program at different ages. By comparing the two approaches I find that the program has a positive effect on enrollment for children that are in the transition age from compulsory to non compulsory school. Moreover, it decreases the probability of a child to participate in the labor market, and has a positive impact on reducing the likelihood to live in poverty. Mediating factors that can partially explain the results are the increased access to sanitation, better quality of materials of the house and a reduced probability to live overcrowded