sensus that quality - rather than quantity - of education is an important driver of economic growth (Hanushek and Woessmann 2008; Hanushek and Woessmann 2012), it is unclear whether information interventions can have long-lasting impact on student achievements. If students expect labor market returns lower than the observed ones, information interventions might be able to increase their effort, and ultimately improve their performance in school. Existing evidence shows either short term positive impact (Nguyen (2008) for Madagascar) or no impact (Fryer (2013) for the US) on learning in early grades.<sup>3</sup> This paper presents evidence from a randomized control trial conducted in Mexico to study whether an information intervention targeting 10th grade students had an impact on their performance in 12th grade.<sup>4</sup> Mexico, as well as other middle-income countries, has reached almost universal enrollment rates in primary and lower secondary, but still faces important challenges in the education system, especially in upper secondary. Only six out of every ten students who enroll in upper secondary education graduate. Education achievements are characterized by large disparities, with those accounted for by gender being particularly striking. Although girls perform at least as well as boys throughout primary and lower secondary education in all subjects, as witnessed by their scores in 6th and 9th grade national census based standardized test - _Evaluación Nacional de Logro Académico en Centros Escolares_ (ENLACE), girls fall dramatically behind boys in 12th grade math scores (see Table 1). While the quality of school supply might play an important role, there is not full clarity on the individual characteristics that can explain the attainment and the achievement gaps. Financial constraints, lack of information and social norms may be important demand side factors behind the high drop out and low learning outcomes, but disentangling their role is empirically challenging.

In 2009 the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education (SEP for its acronym in Spanish), in an attempt to improve on-time graduation and learning outcomes in upper secondary, designed and implemented an intervention to provide students entering 10th grade with a range of information about the returns to upper secondary and tertiary education, as well as on life expectancy and funding opportunities for tertiary education. The pilot program, known as _Percepciones_ , included an evaluation strategy based on a stratified randomized control trial (RCT), with 26 schools assigned to the treatment group and 28 to the control group. In November 2009 the baseline data was collected and the information treatment was delivered. Using 2012 administrative data from the 12th grade national standardized EN-

> 3Nguyen (2008) shows an increase in test scores of fourth graders in Madagascar three months after the intervention. Fryer (2013) finds no impact on student scores in sixth and seventh grade.

> 4Throughout the paper we will use upper secondary education and high school indifferently when we refer to grades 10 to 12. We will use lower secondary when referring to grades 7 to 9.

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