The Effect of Publicly Provided Health Insurance on Academic Performance in Mexico

Abstract

In this paper we study the causal effect of a large expansion of publicly pro- vided health insurance on children’s academic performance using the case of Mexico. In general, access to free health insurance could improve education outcomes directly by ma- king household members healthier or indirectly by raising the amount of resources available for education expenses. Using a panel of municipalities from 2007 to 2009, we find that the expansion of the Mexican public health insurance program, Seguro Popular, had a positive, statistically significant effect on standardized test scores of primary school children