Assesing the Impact of School Subsidies in Bolivia: A Reduced Form Non-Parametric Approach

This paper assesses the impact of Bolivia’s school subsidy program, Bono Juancito Pinto (BJP), on school attendance. BJP is a relatively small cash transfer (less than 30 dollars per child per year) given conditional on being enrolled into a public school and on regular school attendance. Since there are no feasible alternatives of a control group, we use simple structural behavioral models to understand the school-work decision and derive counterfactuals of interest. Estimation is conducted using two dimensional kernel regression estimators. Our results suggest that BJP has been successful increasing school attendance only for young children – 6 to 8 years old, and particularly for girls. We conclude that BJP has only encourage households to enroll children to school at the proper age but has not give an additional incentive to attend to those already enrolled for the first time.