Timing Cash Transfers Around High-Stakes Exams: Impacts on Test Performance and Long-Run Outcomes

Axel Eizmendi Larrinaga

This dissertation examines how short-term financial scarcity around pivotal academic events affects the educational outcomes of low-income students, focusing on Brazil's Bolsa Familia program, the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world. While large income-based gaps in standardized test performance have been documented, little is known about the extent to which these disparities reflect long-term structural disadvantages versus short-lived liquidity shortages immediately before high-stakes exams. The first component exploits random variation in Bolsa Familia payment dates to estimate the causal impact of receiving a cash transfer in the week prior to Brazil's national college entrance exam (ENEM). Using linked administrative records on more than 180,000 test-takers, I show how transfer timing influences exam performance, college enrollment, graduation, and labor market outcomes up to ten years later. The second component uses an original survey of 4,000 low-income secondary school students in Sao Paulo to identify the mechanisms through which temporary alleviation of financial strain improves cognitive performance. The survey measures short-term variation in nutrition, sleep, time use, psychological well-being, and household environment, combined with validated cognitive tests and linked administrative data. By integrating administrative and survey evidence, this dissertation advances understanding of how liquidity constraints affect educational achievement and long-term trajectories. The findings contribute to debates on educational inequality and inform the design of social protection systems, highlighting the potential of benefit timing as a cost-effective tool to improve educational outcomes and mobility.

About Axel Eizmendi Larrinaga

Axel Eizmendi Larrinaga is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and Public Policy at Tufts University. He is a development economist whose research focuses on education and social protection in low- and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on how policy design can improve human capital outcomes and reduce inequality. His work combines large-scale administrative data, household surveys, and quasi-experimental methods to study how financial constraints and program design shape educational trajectories and well-being. He has collaborated closely with government partners in Brazil, contributing to research on cash transfer programs and their implications for education policy. Prior to his Ph.D., Axel completed a master's degree at the University of Oxford, where he also worked as a research assistant on a cash-plus intervention in Kenya, overseeing data collection and analysis. He also worked at the World Bank in the Social Protection Global Practice, where he supported the reform of Iraq's national social protection system. Across his work, Axel aims to produce rigorous, policy-relevant evidence to inform the design of social policies that expand opportunity in low- and middle-income countries.