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This article examines the quality of ex ante assessments of the effects of conditional cash-transfer programs on child time allocation in developing countries. We use data from a social experiment conducted to evaluate the Mexican program Progresa. We compare the results of (1) ex ante simulations obtained through a reduced-form model of the effects of cash transfers on children's school enrollment and labor participation with (2) ex post impact estimates. The ex ante estimation of the effects of parental income rests on an instrumental-variable strategy that uses housing characteristics and household durables as indicators of parents'permanent income. Our results show that the effects simulated ex ante are close to the ones measured ex post using the experimental framework. We discuss the potential biases of both evaluation methods.