Schooling transitions to evaluate the impact of the Bolsa Família Program in Brazil: breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty

Iara Viana, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)
Julio Carepa, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)

Our purpose is to evaluate the impact of the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil on education outcomes. Providing families with an additional income, in exchange for the children’s remaining in school allows the foundation of lesser setbacks to poverty alleviation and breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. Results are based on our primary survey data, of 15,000 households, which provides retrospective and current educational information, allowing the estimation of transition probabilities for the construction of a schooling life table. Probabilities of entrance, exit and re-entrance characterize patterns of the education cycle of our comparison groups. This life table yields the average time lived in each state, allowing to assess the average expected time attending school and the expected final individual years of study. Logistic and multinomial regressions were used to model the conditional probabilities of transition into and out of school.