The main proposal of this study was to evaluate the impact of the Bolsa Família conditioned public cash transfer program on the school presence among the children and adolescents from five to 14 years, in the Brazilian states of Pernambuco, Ceará, Sergipe and Paraíba. The work uses both primary and secondary data (PNAD, 2005) to build two different control groups used for propensity score estimative matching with children from families that received income from the federal program. For all studied groups the impact of the Bolsa Família was positive, in other words, the results indicate that the program increases the school presence by 5,6 points. But the results still suggest there is difference between gender, with the program being effective for girls, but not for boys. This probably is related to the gender difference in the opportunity cost of human capital investment in Brazil rural northeast.
family farm; education; Bolsa Família
