UCLA

This dissertation evaluates the effectiveness of public policies that aim to improve development. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of Progresa program on urban areas and children's health measures in Mexico. Using a differences-in-differences design by a locality's first year of enrollment and the children's age at first exposure to treatment, I estimate the effects of receiving one additional year of treatment during early adolescence. My findings corroborate the RCT's positive impacts on children's height but also underscore some unintended effects of the program on adolescent's health, such as an increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity, particularly among girls.

The second chapter studies the effects of Progresa's cash transfer (CT) intervention on rural children's health outcomes in Mexico. I decompose these effects by conditionality, exploiting a discontinuity in the minimum eligible age for receiving the education CT component. Conditional on family structure and birth order, I estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of receiving a higher CT during early childhood. My results show an increase of 0.13 SD in standardized height-by-age (z-scores) for children who received earlier the education CT --though not statistically significant. While my estimates are imprecise, their magnitude is consistent with previous literature evaluating the effects of Progresa on children's height.

The third chapter documents that municipalities in central Mexico closer in the past to an agricultural estate (hacienda) are associated with higher literacy and lower poverty throughout the 20th century than municipalities similar in other respects but farther away from a hacienda. The results are robust to various specifications, neighbor-matching analyses, and a placebo-type test. The complementarities between late-colonial haciendas in central Mexico and mining and trade appear to have set municipalities close to a hacienda on a distinct development path. The evidence points to local scale economies in hacienda locations that coordinated new investments away from agriculture and toward the latest industrial and commercial sectors. Our findings highlight the role of landed estates as centers linking rural economic activity to the main colonial economic activities.