The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

This paper identifies and quantifies three distortions caused by the existing social security and social assistance systems in Colombia. These distortions refer to the discrepancy between the cost of formal social security for the employer and the worker's valuation of the received service...

Social protection systems in Latin America have been transformed in the past two decades. Until the 1980s, those who were not covered by the social security arrangements available primarily in the urban formal sector received little public assistance beyond universal subsidies for some food or...

When potential beneficiaries share their knowledge and attitudes about a policy intervention, their decision to participate and the effectiveness of both the policy and its evaluation may be influenced. This matters most notably in integrated social policies with several components. In this...

The long-term effects of Mexico's conditional cash transfer program, PROSPERA, on poor households are of great interest to policy makers and academics alike. This paper analyzes the long-term effects on the welfare of the original participant households and their offspring, about 20 years after...

This paper studies an innovative welfare program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program...

This paper takes advantage of the exogenous phasing of direct elections in districts and applies the double-difference estimator to measure impacts on (i) human development outcomes and (ii) the pattern of public spending and revenue generation at the district level. The analysis reveals that...

In the past three decades, emerging countries have gone through extensive decentralization reforms. Yet, there are no studies assessing quantitatively the relative importance of various factors known to affect the success of decentralization. This paper builds on a comprehensive dataset the...

India's fast-growing cities face three key challenges in improving public health outcomes. The first is the persistence of weak links in the chain -- notably, slums badly underserved with basic civic services -- that can pose public health threats to all. Richer residents corner public...

The role of inherited wealth in modern economies has increasingly come under scrutiny. This study presents one of the first attempts to shed light on how demographic aging could shape this role. It shows that, in the absence of retirement annuities, or for a given level of annuitization, both...