Spillovers from Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Bolsa Família and Crime in Urban Brazil

By Laura Chioda, J. M. P. D. Mello, Rodrigo R. Soares. Social Science Research Network, 2016

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 Sao Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the Bolsa Familia 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 Familia. We find a robust and significant negative impact of Bolsa Familia 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.

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54d9ae12f59945280a38ca963561c2ce4c2aed53

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Citations in the corpus

Conditional Cash Transfers, Civil Conflict and Insurgent Influence: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines (2016, background): “…this outcome because insurgent influence can have substantial negative consequences even in the absence of violence.4 The 2 A recent study found that the Brazilian CCT program Bolsa Familia led to a reduction in crime, mostly in the form of robberies and drug-related offenses (Chioda et al., 2012).”