The Incentive Effects of Cash Transfers to the Poor

We are very grateful to Joe Price who directed the team of researchers at the BYU Record Linking Lab, and without whom this project would not have been feasible. We also want to thank the excellent research assistants who have worked on this project: Amanda Loyola Heufemann, Ariadna Jou, Keyoung Lee, Xuan Zhang, Tomas Guanziroli and Diego Zúñiga. We are very grateful to Nathan Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser who helped us with the MVFP computations in this paper. We have benefitted from conversations with Pedro Dal Bó, Bo Honoré, Caroline Hoxby, Petra Persson, Robert Pollack, Aloysius Siow and from the comments of the seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University, the NBER Summer Institute, University of Minnesota, Princeton University, Queen’s University, RAND, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Urbana-Champaign, Wharton, Washington University, UCLA, and Yale University. This project was supported by the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR), which receives core support (P2C- HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and from NIH grant 1 R01 HD077227-01. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.