This paper uses an RCT to estimate the impact of PROBEMS, a scholarship program in Mexico aimed at improving graduation rates and test scores among upper secondary school students from poor backgrounds. We find that, on average, the program has no impact either on graduation rates or on Math and...

The paper provides the first assessment of: (i) America's progress in lifting the lower bound--the floor--of the distribution of real income; (ii) whether the country's largest antipoverty program, SNAP ("food stamps"), helped do so. An operational method of estimating the floor is implemented on...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An...

The paper critically assesses prevailing measures of global poverty. A welfarist interpretation of global poverty lines is augmented by the idea of normative functionings, the cost of which varies across countries. In this light, current absolute measures are seen to ignore important social...

Homelessness may be both a cause of and one of the more extreme outcomes of poverty. Governments at all levels have a variety of tools to combat homelessness, and these strategies have changed dramatically over the past quarter century. In this paper, we catalog the policy responses, the...

This paper evaluates the effects of the War on Poverty's Legal Services Program (LSP) on family structure and welfare participation. LSPs provided subsidized legal assistance to poor communities, focusing on divorce and welfare access. We use a difference-in-differences research design based on...

Strategies based on growth and inequality reduction require a long-run horizon, and this paper therefore argues that those strategies need to be complemented by poverty alleviation programs. With regards to such programs, informality in Latin America and the Caribbean is a primary obstacle to...

Can microcredit help unlock a poverty trap for some people by putting their businesses on a different trajectory? Could the small microcredit treatment effects often found for the average household mask important heterogeneity? In Hyderabad, India, we find that "gung ho entrepreneurs" (GEs),...

This paper reconsiders the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on labor supply at the extensive margin. I investigate every EITC reform at the state and federal level since the inception of the policy in 1975. Based on event studies comparing single women with and without children, or...

How does one's childhood neighborhood shape political engagement later in life? We leverage a natural experiment that moved children out of disadvantaged neighborhoods to study effects on their voting behavior more than a decade later. Using linked administrative data, we find that children who...