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This paper exploits heterogeneity in program exposure to evaluate the effectiveness of a supplementary feeding program implemented in the wake of the 1997-1998 economic crises in Indonesia. The explicit aim of the program was to protect the nutritional status of infants and young children from adverse effects of the crisis. The use of heterogeneity in program exposure has several advantages for identifying the impact of the program. First, the analysis avoids the strong assumption that all targeted children experienced homogenous exposure to the program, and facilitates identification in a setting in which nearly all communities experienced some exposure. Second, by exploiting child age and program eligibility rules, the paper estimates models with community fixed effects and thus avoid bias introduced as a result of endogenous program placement. The analysis finds that the program improved the nutritional status of children 12 to 24 months of age at the time of the survey in 2000, and helped to avoid problems of severe malnutrition among young children.

Child health --- Child nutrition --- Communities --- Communities and Human Settlements --- Economic status --- Governance --- Health Care --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Housing & Human Habitats --- Infant --- Nutritional Status --- Nutritional status of infants --- Policy Research --- Population Policies --- Social Cohesion --- Social Development --- Young children --- Youth and Governance

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Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance. Yet evaluating these claims over more than a few years is hard, as most CCT experiments extend the program to the control group after a short experimental period. This paper experimentally estimates the impacts of Indonesia's cash transfer program (PKH) six years after the program launched, using data from about 14,000 households in 360 sub-districts across Indonesia, taking advantage of the fact that treatment and control locations remained largely intact throughout the period. We find that PKH continues to have large static incentive effects on many of the targeted indicators, increasing usage of trained health professionals for childbirth dramatically and halving the share of children age 7-15 who are not enrolled in school. Wage labor for 13-15 year olds was reduced by at least one-third. We also begin to observe impacts on outcomes that may require cumulative investments: for example, six years later, we observe large reductions in stunting and some evidence of increased high school completion rates. The results suggest that CCT investments can have substantial effects on the accumulation of human capital, and that these effects can persist even when programs are operating at large-scale without researcher intervention.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance. Yet evaluating these claims over more than a few years is hard, as most CCT experiments extend the program to the control group after a short experimental period. This paper experimentally estimates the impacts of Indonesia's cash transfer program (PKH) six years after the program launched, using data from about 14,000 households in 360 sub-districts across Indonesia, taking advantage of the fact that treatment and control locations remained largely intact throughout the period. We find that PKH continues to have large static incentive effects on many of the targeted indicators, increasing usage of trained health professionals for childbirth dramatically and halving the share of children age 7-15 who are not enrolled in school. Wage labor for 13-15 year olds was reduced by at least one-third. We also begin to observe impacts on outcomes that may require cumulative investments: for example, six years later, we observe large reductions in stunting and some evidence of increased high school completion rates. The results suggest that CCT investments can have substantial effects on the accumulation of human capital, and that these effects can persist even when programs are operating at large-scale without researcher intervention.