Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/173840 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-767
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Many poor households in developing countries are liquidity-constrained. As a result, they may under-invest in the human capital of their children. We provide new evidence on the long-term (10-year) effects of cash transfers using data from Ecuador. Our analysis is based on two separate sources of data and two identification strategies. First, we extend the results from an experiment that randomly assigned children under the age of 6 years to early or late treatment groups. Although the early treatment group received twice as much in total transfers, we find no difference between children in the two groups on performance on a large number of tests. Second, we use a regression discontinuity design exploiting the fact that a poverty index was used to determine eligibility for transfers. We focus on children who were just-eligible and just-ineligible for transfers when they were in late childhood, and compare their school attainment and work status 10 years later. Transfers increased secondary school completion, but the effects are small, between 1 and 2 percentage points from a counterfactual school completion rate of 75 percent. We conclude that any effect of cash transfers on the inter-generational transmission of poverty in Ecuador is likely to be modest.
Subjects: 
Conditional cash transfers (CCTs)
poverty-traps
long-term impacts
Ecuador
Bono de Desarrollo Humano
JEL: 
I38
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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