Download or read book Essays on Evaluation of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program written by Xiaohui Hou and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the chapters herein, I explore two issues related to the evaluation of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. The first examines the impact of droughts on food consumption and the mitigating effects of a CCT program. The second looks at the impact of a CCT program on adults' health.

Download or read book Three Essays on Intended and Not Intended Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers written by Elizaveta Perova and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Targeted to the poorest households, Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) may constitute up to 30 percent of the households' monthly consumption. An unexpected increase in income of such magnitude is likely to affect behavior of the beneficiaries beyond the changes envisioned by the creators of the program and imposed by the conditions. My dissertation focuses on such unintended impacts of the CCT programs. I explore the impact of Juntos, a CCT program in Peru, on political participation and intra-household allocations as well as estimate its effects on the targeted outcomes, such as education and utilization of medical services. Using two alternative econometric techniques - difference-in-difference and panel data estimation and individual as well as district level data sets, I demonstrate in my first essay that the program increased turnout in presidential and regional elections in the incorporated districts. In the second essay I address the relationship between domestic violence and increases in the income of a victim, generated by the transfer. I develop a model, which incorporates two aspects of this relationship: increases in victim's income may exacerbate a rent-seeking motif behind domestic violence, and at the same time they may render her greater bargaining power. I empirically test the predictions of the model using difference-in-difference framework and matching techniques. I find that arrival of the program decreased the prevalence of domestic violence, and the decreases are higher among women whose outside of marriage utility is more affected by the transfer than their within marriage utility: women with less children and with cash-paying jobs. In my third essay I carry out an impact evaluation of the targeted outcomes of the program: consumption, education and health. Using matching and instrumental variables methods, I find significant improvements in all three areas.

Download or read book Essays on Ex Ante Evaluations of Cash Transfer Programs written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The World Bank Research Observer written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Development and Behavior Economics An Impact Evaluation of the Bolsa Fam lia Conditional Cash Transfer on Education and the Effect of Leadership Identity on Group Cooperation and Elite Capture written by Elke Schaffland and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation at hand is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 presents an impact evaluation of a widely spread conditional cash transfer in Brazil called Bolsa Família. We analyze the impacts of the program on two educational outcomes: enrollment and attendance. In our analysis we consider the heterogeneous effects of the program. Chapter 2 and 3 study the influence of leaders identity on the group dynamics. Chapter 2 focuses on the effect of leaders identity on cooperation while Chapter 3 studies the dynamics of embezzlement or what we call elite capture. Chapter 1 conducts an imp...

Download or read book A Cost Benefit Framework for Evaluating Conditional Cash Transfer Programs written by Robert J. Brent and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the prototype of Mexico's Progresa program, a number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have initiated conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs. More recently, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have followed suit. However, no comprehensive framework to carry out a cost benefit analysis (CBA) exists. This paper presents such a CBA framework for CCTs which enables design features such as targeting and conditionality to be separately evaluated. The framework is applied to an evaluation of a CCT program for orphans and vulnerable children in Kenya. The role of conditionality in SSA and the need for distribution weights is discussed.

Download or read book Must Conditional Cash Transfer Programs be Conditioned to be Effective The Impact of Conditioning Transfers on School Enrollment in Mexico written by Alan de Brauw and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, there is little evidence about how important each component of these programs is towards achieving these outcomes. This paper contributes to filling this gap by explicitly testing the importance of conditionality on one specific outcome related to human capital formation, school enrollment, using data collected during the evaluation of Mexico's PROGRESA CCT program. We exploit the fact that some PROGRESA beneficiaries who received transfers did not receive the forms needed to monitor the attendance of their children at school. We use a variety of techniques, including propensity score matching, to show that the absence of these forms reduced the likelihood that children attended school with this effect most pronounced when children are transitioning to lower secondary school. We provide substantial evidence that these findings are not driven by unobservable characteristics of households or localities.

Download or read book Evaluating Service Supply in Conditional Cash Transfers written by Nadia Melina Sabat Pereyra and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditional cash transfers are poverty reduction mechanisms that seek to increase demand of social services by combining an income effect with a health or education requirement. This demand-side strategy relies on a tacit assumption about the quality of and access to those services as a path to improve human capital outcomes. Some conditional cash transfers have included supply-side complementary incentives to ensure that services are suitable to deliver a good education and better health. This study reviews the existing evidence on the impact of supply-side incentives in the context of conditional cash transfers. The review finds that a limited number of studies estimate effects of supply in human capital outcomes and only a few impact evaluations consider the role of schools or health centers in enabling access. The evaluations revised find no evidence that supply side interventions coupled with conditional cash transfers directly improve program outcomes. Nonetheless, several studies highlight the relevance of school organization, in terms of school modalities and student/teacher ratios in school enrollment and attendance. Impact estimations as well as the implementation of the supply-side programs also signal the need for a more nuanced understanding of how school management influences a variety of schooling outcomes. In general, the small number of impact estimations and the restricted set of variables used limits the generalizability of the results. For this reason, a principal conclusion of the review is the need for further research on the topic, as well as consistency across impact measures and a more in-depth analysis of school supply and their influence on learning outcomes.

Download or read book Evaluating the Impact of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs written by Laura B. Rawlings and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 investments in human capital-such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers on a regular basis. Rawlings and Rubio review the experience in evaluating the impact of these programs, exploring the application of experimental and quasi-experimental evaluation methods and summarizing results from programs launched in Brazil, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Evaluation results from the first generation of programs in Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua show that conditional cash transfer programs are effective in promoting human capital accumulation among poor households. There is clear evidence of success in increasing enrollment rates, improving preventive health care, and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about the impact of conditional cash transfer programs, including those concerning their effectiveness under different country conditions and the sustainability of the welfare impacts.

Download or read book Essays on Conditional Cash Transfer Programs written by Mette Ersbak Bang Nielsen and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Program Evaluation and the Economics of Immigration written by Gabriel Maurice Gaudefroy Demombynes and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Conditional Cash Transfers written by Ariel Fiszbein and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Specifically, it lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about the economic rationale for CCTs; it reviews the very rich evidence that has accumulated on CCTs; it discusses how the conceptual framework and the evidence on impacts should inform the design of CCT programs in practice; and it discusses how CCTs fit in the context of broader social policies. The authors show that there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people and argue that conditional cash transfers have been an effective way of redistributing income to the poor. They also recognize that even the best-designed and managed CCT cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. They therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs, and social pensions.

Download or read book Evaluating Targeted Cash Transfer Programs written by David Coady and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report focuses on the indirect and direct effects of transfer programs. In particular, it shows how modelling results can be combined with information from standard household surveys to provide an integrated analysis of the direct distributional impact of such programs and the indirect distributional and efficiency impacts arising from domestic financing mechanisms. This approach reflects the view that any credible poverty alleviation strategy must have a credible financing strategy underlying it, and this need for domestic financing can have important consequences for both the level and the distribution of household incomes. To illustrate the approach, the report focuses on the recent introduction in Mexico of an innovative poverty alleviation transfer program called PROGRESA, which has been used as a prototype for similar programs that have recently been implemented in other developing countries.

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Microeconomics written by Ervin Dervisevic and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores various innovative approaches that can be used in development economics in order to more closely examine economic realities of the developing world. This dissertation provides guidance on how methods not used up to this point can be best used to provide a better understanding of the potential impacts of development projects, and also highlights potential areas of improvement in existing methods and practices of data collection and project evaluation. The first essay examines two major channels of social networks influence on the gender norms of young men and women, using the interviews conducted with members of ten camps in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Inequitable gender norms have been identified as one of the major factors to negatively influence HIV-related behavior, domestic violence, and parenting. There is a need for a better understanding of the factors that contribute to inequitable gender norms, and one potential method to change individual gender norms is through social networks. While there are numerous studies dealing with the social networks influence, there are not many that examine the social networks influence on personal norms. Social network influence is examined using the network autoregressive model that takes into account interdependencies among network members, and the results imply that the gender norms of the network actors are correlated with the gender norms of their alters, indicating a similarity of genders norms among closest network members. When different types of network relationships are pooled, actors' attitudes are not correlated with those of their network contacts. Network actors' and their alters' attitudes are significantly correlated in work and problem-solving relationships. The second essay explores whether and how can spatial econometric methodology be used to examine the spatial spillovers of conditional cash transfers. Conditional cash transfer programs are considered to be one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to support the poor in the developing countries. Many studies have been performed that show positive impact of conditional cash transfer on beneficiaries' consumption, health, education, etc. However, spatial inter-village spillovers of these programs are potential impacts of spillovers are mostly neglected. The results of the analysis indicate that there are spatial spillovers that reinforce the effects of the program, and there are benefits in using spatial econometrics methods as additional tool in the impact evaluation of conditional cash transfers and other programs. Using the experimental setup of the Progresa-Oportunidades program in Mexico, we find evidence of positive effects of program density on junior and senior high school enrollment among the poor beneficiaries in treated villages. The third essay analyses the impact of gender and marriage perceptions on reporting about labor outcomes using a survey conducted in Ghana. When the standard surveys are conducted in developing countries, they mostly rely only on household heads to provide information about all household members. An alternative approach is taken within the Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative which attempts to conduct interviews with all household members above a certain age. However, there are only a few empirical studies that attempt to provide a framework for understanding the potential advantages and disadvantages of using self and proxy reporters in developing countries. The impact of different factors on labor reporting is examined using the standard models for corner solutions and ordinary least squares. The results of the estimations provide evidence of the influence of gender and marriage perceptions on labor reporting.

Download or read book A Review of Recent Developments in Impact Evaluation written by Asian Development Bank and published by Asian Development Bank. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impact evaluation aims to answer whether and to what extent a development intervention has delivered its intended effects, thus enabling evidence-based policy making. The desire for more hard evidence of the effectiveness of development interventions has fueled a growing interest in rigorous impact evaluation in the international development community. This report discusses the fundamental challenge of impact evaluation, which is to credibly attribute the impact, if any, to the intervention concerned. It then discusses the merits and limitations of various impact evaluation methods. It also presents a survey of recent applications of impact evaluation, focusing on the typical evaluation problems looked at, methods used, and key findings. The report includes six case studies and outlines practical steps in implementing an impact evaluation.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Methods for Evaluating Educational Interventions written by Gary D. Phye and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-04-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New US government requirements state that federally funded grants and school programs must prove that they are based on scientifically proved improvements in teaching and learning. All new grants must show they are based on scientifically sound research to be funded, and budgets to schools must likewise show that they are based on scientifically sound research. However, the movement in education over the past several years has been toward qualitative rather than quantitative measures. The new legislation comes at a time when researchers are ill trained to measure results or even to frame questions in an empirical way, and when school administrators and teachers are no longer remember or were never trained to prove statistically that their programs are effective.Experimental Methods for Evaluating Educational Interventions is a tutorial on what it means to frame a question in an empirical manner, how one needs to test that a method works, what statistics one uses to measure effectiveness, and how to document these findings in a way so as to be compliant with new empirically based requirements. The book is simplistic enough to be accessible to those teaching and administrative educational professionals long out of schooling, but comprehensive and sophisticated enough to be of use to researchers who know experimental design and statistics but don't know how to use what they know to write acceptable grant proposals or to get governmental funding for their programs. * Provides an overview to interpreting empirical data in education* Reviews data analysis techniques: use and interpretation* Discusses research on learning, instruction, and curriculum* Explores importance of showing progress as well as cause and effect* Identifies obstacles to applying research into practice*Examines policy development for states, nations, and countries