sentativeness. It is collected every two years from August to November. We used ENIGH-MCS for 2010, 2012, and 2014 to construct a pooled cross-section dataset. The survey includes a wide variety of socioeconomic variables at the household and individual level such as: sex, housing conditions, years of education, marital status, income, hours worked in the previous week, indigenous language spoken if any, and disability condition, among others. ENIGH-MCS data has been collected since 2008, allowing the estimation of time-trends for all its variables. The publicly available data from ENIGH do not include the exact village size, although it includes a village size range.

The ENIGH-MCS also identifies individuals receiving a cash transfer from PAM and other important social programs that might impact poverty and labor supply, such as PROSPERA and PROCAMPO. It also captures “other” non-contributory pension cash transfers received besides PAM. This is particularly important since some state level social pension programs, could complicate the identification of PAM’s effects. Studies that do not consider the existence of similar state-level non-contributory pension programs could produce biased estimations. These state-level noncontributory programs are usually not very large, except in a few cases. To avoid potentially biased estimations, and after performing a quantitative and qualitative analysis we concluded that data from Chiapas and Mexico City had to be excluded from this study.

The noncontributory pension programs in Mexico City and Chiapas started in 2001 and 2009, respectively; they target the population in the treatment and/or control groups of our study; and both programs are relatively large considering both budget size and number of beneficiaries. In 2014, both programs had a budget of over 1 billion pesos and over 100,000 beneficiaries each.<sup>11</sup> While in-kind social programs for the elderly could have similar consequences in the estimations, in-kind social programs identified are relatively small in comparison to larger cash transfer programs. Additionally, the information to identify when an in-kind transfer program comes from a social program is not available.<sup>12</sup>

# 3.4 Characteristics of Mexico’s Elderly Population

PAM aims to improve life conditions of older adults that are 65 years old and older who do not receive contributory pensions. In 2014, 64.6% of the elderly in Mexico reported that they had never contributed to a social security institution. Out of the 35.4% of the elderly who reported to have contributed to social security, they reported to have contributed 24.3 years, on average. Not surprisingly, those who reported to have contributed to a social security institution had significantly more years of schooling than those who reported that they had not contributed with 7.7 and 3.1 years of schooling, respectively.

Only 28.8% of the elderly reported in 2014 that they were receiving a contributory pension or retirement payment. However, 82.2% of the elderly have access to social security as defined in the multidimensional poverty indicator.<sup>13</sup> This can be partially explained by the fact that by receiving

> 11For the Government of Chiapas, the budget of its social pension program represented about 0.4% of GDP and benefited 45.2% of the population 65 years old or older in 2014. For the Government of Mexico City, the budget of its social pension program represented 2.1 percent of its GDP and benefited 61.2% percent of the population 65 years old or older in the same year.

> 12A detailed description of the methodology used to select what states to exclude is shown in Appendix C.

> 13The official poverty measurement methodology identifies the population with access to social security based on the following four

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