Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs innovate by conditioning transfers to poor families on investments in the human capital of children and other family members. The Mexican CCT program Progresa/Oportunidades began in 1997 and has served as a model for many of the now over sixty countries with CCTs around the world, in large part due to its initial evaluation with an experimental design and numerous follow-up studies. This article reviews the literature on the development, evaluation, and findings of Progresa/Oportunidades, summarizing what is known about program effects, taking into account corrections for multiple-hypothesis testing.

This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, teachers, and school administrators. Program impact estimates reveal the largest average effects for treatment 3, smaller impacts for treatment 1, and no impact for treatment 2.