Bolsa Família Program in Brazil: assessing the impact on educational indicators of children and adolescents by regions.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of receiving Bolsa Familia Program (BFP) on the school performance of Brazilian children and adolescents in different age groups and in different regions of the country. The BFP, created in 2003, benefits about 13 million families in poverty and extreme poverty through direct transfer of income. One of the conditions to receive the benefit is that children between 6 and 17 years old attend schools regularly. The data comes from two sources: an evaluation of the Center for Public Policy and Education Evaluation (CAEd) applied to students in public education and the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) both in 2011. After a simulation to estimate the beneficiary families in PNAD, the methodology employed is the Propensity Score Matching that allows comparison of beneficiary families with not beneficiaries ones whose observable characteristics are similar. The results illustrate, by some indicators, the impact of Bolsa Família on the school performance of children and adolescents after nine years of program deployment.