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Many mid-income countries face a significant and challenging problem of low educational achievement. This research looks at a Full-Time Primary Schools Programme implemented in Mexico, to work out if extending the time pupils spend at school can enhance skills in language and mathematics. The results of matching plus difference-in-differences point to a positive impact on schools value-added. The effects are concentrated among poorer schools, with gains after policy adoption of 0.11 standard deviations (SD) in both subjects. However, quantile regressions show that the lowest-performance schools are not benefiting from longer school days, posing questions on programme effectiveness to improve the achievement of those who are more in need. Analysis of causal channels suggests that gains reported by the programme do not come from changes in the composition of teachers and pupils in treated schools, and that richer schools are more prone to devote the extra-time of instruction to non-core subjects, notably sports and arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the effects of extending the school day during elementary school on students' educational outcomes later in life. The analysis takes place in the context of a large-scale program introduced in 2007 that extended the school day from 4.5 to 8 h in Mexico City's metropolitan area. The identification strategy leverages cohort-by-cohort variation in full-time enrollment in elementary schools. The results indicate that full-time elementary schools have positive and long-lasting effects on students' performance, increasing high-stakes high school admission test scores by 4.8 percent of a standard deviation. The effects are larger for females than for males. The difference in the effects between males and females of 2.1 percent of a standard deviation represents 16% of the gender gap in the high school admission exam. Moreover, full-time schooling decreases the probability of delays in schooling completion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low rates of female labor force participation (LFP) have been linked to the absence of childcare policies. This article examines the degree to which extending the school day by 3.5 hours in elementary schools, a large implicit childcare subsidy, affects LFP, the number of weekly hours worked, and the monthly earnings of females with elementary‐school‐age children. To do so, we exploit within‐individual variation in access to full‐time schools and a rotating panel of households that contains 12 years of individual‐level data on labor outcomes and sociodemographic characteristics. Results from long‐difference models show that extending the school day increases mothers' labor supply, increasing LFP by 5.5 percentage points and the number of weekly hours worked by 1.8. Moreover, these increases are accompanied by a raise in monthly earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the 100% increase in the minimum wage in the northern border area of Mexico in 2019 and its total, gender, and sector effects on employment and wages. Based on data from the National Occupation and Employment Survey, differences-in-differences and event study design models are estimated to calculate the average and dynamic effects of the policy. The results show that the increase in the minimum wage did not statistically affect the probability of participating in the labor market or of being employed; however, among salaried workers, it did increase the probability of working in the formal sector by 1.38 percentage points, where this effect rises to 2.34 percentage points among women and was non-significant among men. Concerning the mean hourly wage, an increase of 3.27% was observed in formal salaried workers and of 3.56% among women, while no signifi- cant effects were found within informal salaried workers and men. Along the wage distribution, positive average effects were observed for formal wage earners up to the 50th quantile and among informal wage earners up to the 25th quantile. The increase in the minimum wage affected positively and to a greater extent women and low-wage workers. Moreover, since the wage increase was accompanied by other economic policies that appear to have reduced inflation, the results can be interpreted as an upper bound of the positive effects of the minimum wage in crease and in the absence of the other policies, or contexts where only the wage increase occurred, its effects on wages could have been smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]