between 15 and 35 years of age, and who comprise a subset of the sample of the panel of ENCEL, were selected.<sup>19</sup> ENCEL 2017 is composed of four data-bases:

- 1) Household – which comprises information on the characteristics of the selected youth’s household, reported by a proper household informant;

- 2) Members – which includes information on the characteristics of all the members of the selected youth’s household, reported by a proper household informant;<sup>20</sup>

- 3) Youths – which comprises more detailed information on the selected youths, provided by them directly;

4) Providers – which includes more detailed information on the characteristics of the selected youths’ providers when the youths were 14 years old, reported by the providers directly.<sup>21</sup> The implementation of the survey faced various limitations. One of the most important limitations was missing data, that is, a significant number of the selected youths could not be found. The survey was not designed to have a follow-up mechanism for the youths that have migrated from their localities of origin and only those residing in the same municipality, in some operational routes or in the cities of Mexico, Guadalajara and Monterrey, were able to be sought after. Therefore, data were recovered on only some of the migrant youths within the sample, particularly those residing within Mexico and in some of the aforementioned places. Hence, from the 15,457 initially selected, information on the households or members of only 12,470 youths was collected, and only 6,186 of them could be directly interviewed through a youths’ questionnaire. Furthermore, only in the case of 4,962 of these youths was it possible to directly interview their provider.<sup>22</sup> In accordance with the interests of the research, our analysis required focusing on the youths that cover the following criteria:

- Belonged to a household that in 1997 was eligible or that through the period of the panel

- had received benefits from PROSPERA.

- Were between 18 and 35 years of age. The range starts at the legal age to enroll in high

- school and concludes at the maximum age of the selected sample for ENCEL 2017.

- Were employed at the time of the study, since a study like this necessarily requires that

- individuals under study have entered the labor market.

> 19 See World Bank (2018a and 2018c) for a description of the design of ENCEL 2017 and of the collected information. 20 In the household and members databases, new households were included (not interviewed in the baseline), which were created in recent years by some selected youths (World Bank, 2018a).

> 21 The age of 14 years old is commonly used by intergenerational mobility studies to define characteristics of social origin, because it is considered to possibly represent an important moment in the formation of the individual. 22 According to the World Bank (2018d), youths who were interviewed directly in the survey, in contrast with those who were in the sampling frame but not interviewed, come from households that, on average, are reasonably similar. This, in terms of age and schooling of the head of the household, as well as in the proportion in which the latter were employed as day laborers or workmen, the access to social security through the employment of the head of the household, the percentile of the poverty index and the size of the household. Nonetheless, it is possible to differentiate them by the lower degree of marginalization of the communities of origin exhibited by those who were interviewed, even though these differences were small in magnitude (World Bank, 2018d).

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