This work estimates the impact on school enrollment of a Nicaraguan conditional cash transfer program, Red de Protección Social (RPS). RPS is one of a growing number of these programs (e.g. Progresa, Bolsa Escola, and PRAF) that pays households regular cash transfers on the condition that their children attend school and all household members visit health clinics and seminars. A household model...

Many large government programs provide benefits in kind as opposed to in cash. Providing benefits in kind potentially distorts decisions and leads to a deadweight loss if recipients value the benefits less than a cost-equivalent cash transfer. Yet providing benefits in kind may have some offsetting benefits, especially in terms of improving the targeting of benefits to desired beneficiaries. We...

We examine the relative merits of targeting children within the household through price subsidies and cash transfers. To do so, we model the behavior of a household composed of one adult and one child. We then show that ‘favorable’distortions from price subsidies may allow redistributing toward the child and then derive the conditions under which this redistributive scheme is more e¢ cient than...

INTRODUCTION Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been largely used in the world during the past decades, since they are known for enhancing children's human development and promoting social inclusion for the most deprived groups. In other words, CCTs seek to create life chances for children to overcome poverty and exclusion, thus reducing inequality of opportunity. The main goal of the prese...