It is often assumed that transfers received from governments, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), friends and relatives help rural households to pool risk. In this paper I investigate two functions of transfers in Ethiopia: risk pooling and income redistribution. Unlike most of the literature...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

The success of multi-faceted "graduation" programs at reducing poverty raises three questions: can the impacts of these programs be maintained when implemented by governments at scale, will positive effects be offset by negative spillovers, and can bundled programs be streamlined without losing...

We study the effects of an unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children. The program allocated $1,076 to randomly selected households in rural Kenya. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children from 1,687 households with survey questions and incentivized...

We estimate the effects of cash transfers on a severe measure of child welfare: maltreatment. To do so, we leverage year-to-year household variation from a universal and unconditional cash transfer, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Using linked individual-level administrative data on...

Do non-traditional digital trace data and traditional survey data yield similar estimates of the impact of a cash transfer program? In a randomized controlled trial of Togo's COVID-19 Novissi program, endline survey data indicate positive treatment effects on beneficiary food security, mental...

Can participation in safety net programs have long-lasting negative effects across multiple generations? Prior work shows a 1993 Dutch disability insurance reform which tightened requirements and lowered benefits for participants resulted in better outcomes for their children. We study the third...

Despite significant economic growth, child development outcomes in India remain poor. Using a large-scale experiment in which randomly-selected mothers receive cash transfers for the first two years of their child's life, we examine the relationship between income and child development in the...

We are the first to document that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) caseworker behavior impacts program receipt, likely due to differing levels of helpfulness in navigating the complicated application process. We use the conditional random assignment of caseworkers as an...

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on poverty and public assistance use. Using data from the PSID, we find that increased exposure to the EITC in childhood reduces the use of public assistance in adulthood (WIC and other public assistance)...