This presentation will be about Mexico’s pioneering conditional cash program Prospera, which provides transfers linked to school enrollment and preventive health visits to the population in extreme poverty, and was well known for its success in raising education and health among its beneficiary youth, inspiring numerous similar programs around the world. We study a unique natural experiment, the sudden and unexpected rollback of this prominent program in early 2019, on school enrollment following rollback. We merge administrative information on Prospera receipt at the time of rollback to the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE), comparing enrollment before and after rollback across municipalities with different enrollment intensities.  Our results suggest large and immediate negative effects of the rollback on school enrollment, concentrated on boys at the secondary school level.  The size of these effects appears to be as large as the initial positive effects on school enrollment observed when the program began.

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