negative values of 6 percent and below. This result can be signaling several different underlying relations, but since it results from controlling for household income and rural location, it may reflect other elements not included in the equation, such as the relevance and quality of education, including access to bilingual education or the adaptation of national curriculums to local contexts, which are important issues in Panama and other countries (World Bank 2014a).<sup>18</sup> The marginal effects of the second set of variables related to household characteristics is presented in Figure 16. In all countries, household poverty, an unemployed household head, and the youth playing the role of main breadwinner, are each negatively correlated with enrollment, but statistical significance varies. The negative effect of poverty is significant across countries, and is larger in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

We include in the estimation the share of household income that originates through remittances, in order to capture one of the channels through which migration, a particularly relevant factor in Central America, can influence enrollment. Among the five countries (all but Panama) for which data are available, remittances are significantly positively correlated with the probability of youth being enrolled in school at ages 12 to 17 in all but Costa Rica. The effects are particularly large in Honduras and El Salvador, with positive values of 11 and 9 percent, respectively.

The marginal effects of additional characteristics of the household are plotted in Figure 17. In particular, we include a dummy variable for single-parent households which may relate to the amount of family support youth receive and what they are responsible for in the household. This may also be a mechanism through which migration affects dropout, since when an important breadwinner leaves the family unit, responsibilities are likely reassigned, with new demands on income-earning activities or household-related chores that may impose constraints on time use by secondary age youth, which can affect school attendance.<sup>19</sup> The marginal effect on school enrollment of being in a single-parent household is negative in every country and significant in most cases.

If single-parenthood is associated with migration, the value of the marginal effect for this variable should be added to the positive effect of remittances to obtain a more complete sense of the overall effect. When doing so, we find that the positive effect of remittances on enrollment is canceled out in Costa Rica and Guatemala (although marginally). In the other countries where both effects can be measured, the positive effect prevails. These positive correlations, however, have not held up in research for El Salvador that attempts to control for a more complete set of factors that may affect both remittances and school participation through various techniques (Propensity Score Matching, Instrumental Variables, etc.) and by using panel data (Acosta 2011a; Acosta 2011b). In these papers, the author finds that both the gender of the migrant and the gender of the remaining youth matters – for example, while male migration does not significantly affect enrollment, female migration reduces it even though women send more remittances, potentially in line with the discussion of reassignment of household duties discussed above.

> 18 Indigenous group status is also self-reported, which may affect how these correlations are interpreted. 19 Evidently, there are other reasons why a household can be of single parent, but due to the high migration rates in some CA counties it is likely that an important source is precisely the exit of one parent that seeks employment in another region or country.

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