P roviding assistance to the poor through in-kind transfers, such as vouchers for food and housing, garners more political support than providing assistance in cash. Supporters of such policies believe that providing voucher payments for certain goods (such as groceries) will cause recipients to purchase more of the goods being subsidized, and that recipients will not be able to use public assi...

Conditional cash transfer programs have been shown to be effective development strategies for raising human capital investments in children in many LDCs. In this paper, we use experimental data from cash transfer programs in three Latin America countries to assess the potential, unintended impact of conditional cash transfers programs on childbearing. Because cash transfer programs both affect ...

A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early-life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known about whether poverty-alleviation programs improve children's developmental outcomes. We examine how...

Credit-card issuers in the United States have begun to explore the idea of introducing electronic-cash products. Seven financial giants, including Wells Fargo, Chase Manhattan, and MasterCard, have agreed to market the Mondex electronic cash product in the United States.1 VISA is developing a separate product. These products consist of a plastic payment card and other accessories, and consumers...

Credit-card issuers in the United States have begun to explore the idea of introducing electronic-cash products. Seven financial giants, including Wells Fargo, Chase Manhattan, and MasterCard, have agreed to market the Mondex electronic cash product in the United States.1 VISA is developing a separate product. These products consist of a plastic payment card and other accessories, and consumers...

Investing in social protection in sub-Saharan Africa has taken on a new urgency as HIV and AIDS interact with other drivers of poverty to simultaneously destabilise livelihoods systems and family and community safety nets. Cash transfer programmes already reach millions of people in South Africa, and in other countries in southern and East Africa plans are underway to reach tens and eventually ...

Electronic cash (e-cash) refers to money exchanged electronically. The main features of traditional cash are usually considered desirable also in the context of e-cash. One such property is off-line transferability, meaning the recipient of a coin in a transaction can transfer it in a later payment transaction to a third person without contacting a central authority. Among security properties, ...

Background Assessment of the impact of emergency cash transfer programs on child nutritional status has been difficult to achieve due to the considerable logistic and ethical constraints that characterize humanitarian settings. Methods We present the findings from a quasi-experimental longitudinal study of a conditional emergency cash transfer program implemented by Concern Worldwide in 2012 ...

This paper shows why, under incomplete information, regulatory practices that alter market prices can redistribute resources more efficiently than cash transfers. In our model the representative citizen cares about a project that benefits a special interest. An example of such a project is the adoption of accessibility devices regulated by the American with Disabilities act. The project can be ...

Several non-cash record-keeping systems are formulated in a randommatching model. The crucial informational friction is that a seller’s endowment, which may be a random variable, and the transfer of goods to a buyer can only be observed by the traders in a pairwise meeting. With this friction monitoring of the payment is distinguished from monitoring of the complete transaction. For each implem...