Conditional cash transfer programs have spread to over 80 countries in the past two decades, but little is known about their long-term effects on the youth they target. This paper estimates the impact of childhood exposure to the Mexican program Progresa on economic outcomes in early adulthood...

We assess long-term impacts of the Mexican conditional cash transfer (CCT) program on youth employment and earnings. We rely on the original random assignment into early and late treatment localities, which introduced CCTs in 1998 and 2000. We focus on children between 7 and 16 years of age in...

This paper examines the economic foundations of some recently proposed criteria for evaluating the benefits of social programs. These criteria are appropriate for comparing a class of revenue-constant policies. They replace foundational principles of social opportunity costs with accounting...

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed...

The extent to which households can self-insure and the government can help them to do so depends on the wage risk that they face and their family structure. We study wage risk in the UK and show that the persistence and riskiness of wages depends on one's age and position in the wage...

The passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill led to sweeping changes to the central U.S. cash safety net program for families with children. Importantly, along with other changes, the reform imposed lifetime time limits for receipt of welfare de facto ending the entitlement nature of cash welfare...

High rates of understatement are found for many government transfer programs and in many datasets. This understatement has major implications for our understanding of economic well-being and the effects of transfer programs. We provide estimates of the extent of under-reporting for ten transfer...

We analyze the impact of the original means-tested Old Age Assistance (OAA) programs on the health of the elderly prior to the first Social Security pension payments. Before 1935 a number of states had enacted their own OAA laws. After 1935 the federal government began offering matching grants...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in earnings disregards for welfare assistance received by single mothers following welfare reform in 1996. Some states adopted much higher earnings disregards (women could work full time and still receive welfare), while other states did not. We...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...