Rolling Back Progresa: How the Sudden Ending of a Landmark Anti-Poverty Program Affected School and Labor

Mexico’s pioneering conditional cash transfer program—originally Progresa, later renamed Prospera—operated over two decades in a shifting educational landscape. We exploit the program’s sudden and unexpected rollback to estimate whether, two decades after rollout studies documented its initial impacts on schooling and labor, the program was still effective at raising enrollment and reducing work in children and youth. Comparing areas with high and low program penetration before and after rollback, we find that rollback immediately reduced school enrollment, especially at high school ages and especially in boys. Effects on enrollment were as large at rollback as they were at rollout, albeit shifted from middle-school ages to high school ages. Rising work mirrored falling enrollment in boys of high school age. Our results suggest the program successfully adapted to the rise of high school, but Mexico’s poor were unable to protect their children from the its unexpected rollback.