¿Quiénes son los NiNis en México?

The objective of this paper is to characterize the population between 15 and 19 years of age in Mexico which does not study and does not work (NiNi). We use the population censuses for 1990, 2000 and 2010, income and expenditure household surveys from 1992 to 2010, and labor surveys from 2005 to 2010. We find that the percentage of NiNis in the population has decreased during the period of study. However, there are stark differences by gender for the decade. With the Great Recession we observe a spike in the proportion of NiNis for males, but not for women. In the case of women, the proportion of NiNis declines steadily during the period mostly due to higher labor force participation and greater school attendance. The estimates from the three samples used are consistent. We estimate that there are 8.6 million NiNis in Mexico in 2010 (28.9 percent of the population in this age group), of which 6.55 of them are women. Finally we found that the most important correlates of idleness are education and household income in the case on men, and domestic work in the case of women.