Devesh Kapur ([email protected]) is with the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, US; Partha Mukhopadhyay ([email protected]) is at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi; Arvind Subramanian ([email protected]) is with the Perterson Institute for International Economics, the Centre for Global Development, and Johns Hopkins University, US. ...

©) was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting food needs of the developing world on a sustainable basis, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. While the research effort is geared to the precise objective of contributing to the reduction of hunger and malnutriti...

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. I use a randomized controlled trial of the Mexican government’s Food Assistance Program (‘PAL’) to test whether this form of paternalism is necessary, comparing precisely measured consumption and health outcomes under both inkind food and cash transfers. Importantly, I …nd that ho...

Welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. I use a randomized controlled trial of the Mexican government’s Food Assistance Program (‘PAL’) to test whether this form of paternalism is necessary, comparing precisely measured consumption and health outcomes under both inkind food and cash transfers. Importantly, I …nd that ho...

Many of the most important government programs make transfers in kind as opposed to in cash. Making transfers in kind has the obvious cost that recipients would at least weakly prefer cost-equivalent cash transfers. But making transfers in kind can have benefits as well, including better targeting transfers to desired recipients. In this paper, we exploit large-scale randomized experiments run ...

This paper examines whether giving large cash transfers to financially distressed people causes them to avoid bankruptcy. A comparison of Florida Lottery winners who randomly received $50,000 to $150,000 to small winners indicates that such transfers only postpone bankruptcy rather than prevent it, a result inconsistent with the negative shock model of bankruptcy. Furthermore, the large winners...

In the past decade, cash transfers have been gaining in popularity as a preferred strategy for poverty reduction in different parts of the world. Some have even argued that it can become the solution to the problem of poverty. Some analysts have described cash transfers as not only “the most necessary, obvious and imperative strategy for poverty alle-viation” but even suggested “that these shou...