Spillovers from Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Bolsa Família and Crime in Urban Brazil
This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the Bolsa Família program on crime. We address the endogeneity of CCT coverage by exploiting the 2008 expansion of the program to adolescents aged 16 and 17. We construct an instrument that combines the timing of expansion and the initial demographic composition of schools to identify plausibly exogenous variations in the number of children covered by Bolsa Família. We find a robust and significant negative impact of Bolsa Família coverage on crime. The evidence suggests that the main effect works through increased household income or changed peer group, rather than from incapacitation from time spent in school.
Texto para discussão no. 599
2012
Laura Chioda. João Manoel Pinho de Mello. Rodrigo Reis Soares.
Destaques
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Rodrigo Reis Soares, Juliano Junqueira Assunção, Tomás Fonseca Goulart, A Note on Slavery and the Roots of Inequality , Journal of Comparative Economics, 2012
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Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, Felipe Tâmega Fernandes, Brazil: The resilience of the Brazilian Insurance Market, 2012
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Rodrigo Reis Soares, D. Krueger, M. Berthelon, Household choices of child labor and schooling: a simple model with application to Brazil , Journal of Human Resources, 2012
Textos para discussão
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