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...

Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs recently introduced in the Latin America and the Caribbean region have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness. These programs provide money to poor families, conditional on certain behavior, usually...

Social funds represent a diverse universe of World Bank projects. Social funds are defined as agencies or programs that channel grants to communities for small scale development projects. Social funds typically finance some mixture of socio economic infrastructure (e.g. building or...

Social Safety Nets (SSN) are defined as non?contributory transfer programs targeted to the poor or those vulnerable to poverty and shocks. About half of World Bank social protection projects in the reviewed cohort are SSN. They are mostly non?emergency investment operations with a higher...

Social programs are often designed under the assumption that individuals make rational decisions that improve their welfare. Yet, informational and behavioral constraints limit the extreme and chronic poor's access and participation in social programs. This paper reviews the implementation and...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition. The success of CCT programs at reducing poverty depends on whether, and the extent...

Randomized control trials are sometimes used to estimate the aggregate benefit from some policy or program. To address the potential bias from selective take-up, the randomization is used as an instrumental variable for treatment status. Does this (popular) method of impact evaluation help...

The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. It also calls for donors to be more responsive to the quality of recipient country systems: the optimal level of their use, in terms of maximizing the...

This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action have focused attention on...

This Policy Note presents the potential poverty impacts of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (Pantawid Pamilya) using simple analytical tools and the government's largest database of poor households to date, the National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR). In doing...