⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Economics, Street, Wellesley MA 02481, United States. Tel.: +1 781 E-mail address: [email protected] (P.J. McEw 1 TheProgresa experiment inMexico showed short-run e percentage point among primary children—with primary en 90%—but 6–9 percentage points among secondary school ch et al., 2005; Skoufias, 2005). Almost six years after the treat the educati...

We investigate the relative merits of unconditional cash transfers (UCT), conditional cash transfers (CCT), and improvements in education quality on efficiency and welfare. In our setting some parents under-invest in their children's education because capital market imperfections prevent them from borrowing. When credit constrained households can be perfectly targeted by the government, we show...

We examine the social pension in South Africa, where large cash sums-about twice the median per capita income of African households-are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions. We present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers, documenting who receive the pension...

In this paper, we estimate a collective model of household consumption and test the restrictions of collective rationality using z-conditional demands in the context of a large Conditional Cash Transfer programme in rural Mexico. We show that the model is able to explain the impacts the programme has on the structure of food consumption. We use two plausible and novel distribution factors, that...

How many more trials will be needed to endorse the use of small regular cash amounts to improve the health of the very poor? In their study in The Lancet Global Health, Audrey Pettifor and colleagues show that cash transfers reduce key HIV risk behaviours in adolescent girls (sexual activity in the past 12 months, unprotected sex in the past 3 months, and intimate partner violence as an additio...

The unitary model has been rejected many times. In this paper, we start from one such rejection in the context of rural Mexico and propose a test of one of the main alternatives to the unitary model, the so called collective model, a model that assumes that intrahousehold allocations, however, determined, are e¢ cient. The test we propose requires the consideration of a demand system with at le...

The world's economy is in a fragile state. Although cautiously recovering from a global recession, unemployment rates and poverty levels remain high. At the same time, food and fuel crises have resulted in skyrocketing commodity costs, straining household budgets even further than before. In the wake of these financial pressure points, there has been increased focus on social safety net program...

Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer from “cash” users to credit card users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of merchant fees. On average, each cash-using household transfers $50 to households that use credit cards, and each credit card using household receives a subsidy of $240 every year. Among ca...