This thesis encompasses three essays around criminal behaviour with the first one analysing the impact of programmes aimed at poverty reduction, the second one developing a theoretical model of hysteresis in crime, and the third one empirically investigating the hysteresis hypothesis in crime rates. In the first chapter I investigate the impact of conditional cash transfers (CCT) on crime rates by analysing the Brazilian Bolsa Familia, the largest CCT programme in the world, in a panel data between 2001 and 2008. The related existing economic literature analysing general welfare programmes usually ignores the crucial endogeneity involved in the relationship between crime rates and social welfare policies through poverty, since poorer regions are focused in the distribution of resources. I use the existing temporal heterogeneity in the implementation of the programme across the states to identify the causal impact of CCT programmes on poverty and criminality. The guidelines of the Brazilian programme established that the amount of resources available for each state should be based on the poverty levels in the 2000 Census. However, due to reasons unrelated to poverty levels and crime rates, some states were able to implement the programme to a greater extent more quickly than others. States that reached the level of cash transfer expenditures proposed by the guidelines of the programme more promptly had a more significant reduction in poverty rates. Similar but less robust results are found for crime rates as robbery, theft and kidnapping, while no significant effects were found for homicide and murder, indicating a weak or non-existent relationship between conditional cash transfers and crime. I also develop, to my knowledge, the first theoretical model to explicitly account for hysteresis - a situation where positive exogenous variations in the relevant economic variables have a different effect from negative variations - in both criminal behaviour and crime rates in order to fill the gap between the theoretical predictions and the empirical evidence about the efficiency of policies in reducing crime rates. The majority of the theoretical analyses predict a sharp decrease in crime rates when there are significant improvements in the economic conditions or an increase in the probability of punishment. However, the existing empirical studies have found lower than expected effects on crime rates from variations in variables related to those factors. One important consequence of hysteresis is that the effect on an outcome variable from positive exogenous variations in the determining variables has a different magnitude from negative variations. For example, if hysteresis is present in the criminal behaviour and part of the police force in a city are dismissed in a given year, resulting in an escalation in crime, a reversal of the policy in the following year by readmitting all sacked police officers in an attempt to restore the original crime levels will result in lower crime rates, but higher than the original ones, yielding an asymmetric relationship between police and crime. Hysteresis is considered in a simple framework to model illicit behaviour. At the individual level, if criminal activity is associated with intrinsic sunk costs and learning, then the cost of leaving a criminal career is higher than entering it. At the aggregate level with homogeneous agents, this is translated into a hysteresis effect that will only occur if a specific threshold is surpassed. With heterogeneous agents, this phenomenon is reinforced generating a hysteresis effect that exists for all possible values of the variable affecting the crime decision. There are multiple equilibria at both levels. In the last chapter I empirically investigate the existence of hysteresis in crime rates. To my knowledge, this is the first empirical study to consider the existence of asymmetric effects on crime from variations in the probability of punishment and in the opportunity cost of crime. More specifically, I investigate whether positive variations on variables associated to those factors, respectively police officers and average level of income, are statistically different from negative variations. Using US crime data at the state level between 1977 and 2010, I find that police force size and real average income of unskilled workers have asymmetric effects on most types of crimes. The absolute value of the average impact of positive variations in those variables on property and violent crime rates are statistically smaller than the absolute value of the average effect of negative variations. These effects are robust under several specifications. A closer inspection of the data reveals a relatively monotonic negative relationship between wages and property crime rates, as well as negative variations in police and most crime rates. However, the relationships between positive variations in law enforcement size and most crime rates are non-linear. The magnitude of the observed asymmetries supports the hypothesis of hysteresis in crime, and suggests that no theoretical or empirical analysis would be complete without careful consideration of that important feature in the relationships between crime, police and legal income. These results corroborate the argument that policy makers should be more inclined to set pre-emptive policies rather than mitigating measures.

No description available.

[pt] Esse artigo realiza um estudo dos efeitos do Programa Bolsa Escola Federal sobre as despesas das famílias. A base de dados utilizada foi a Pesquisa dos Orçamentos Familiares (POF), que por tratar de forma detalhada das despesas das famílias e por fornecer o valor recebido pelas famílias do Programa Bolsa Escola Federal, propicia uma excelente oportunidade de responder a questão referente ao destino do dinheiro recebido do programa. O principal resultado é que famílias que recebem a bolsa do Programa Bolsa Escola tendem a gastar mais em alimentos e não reduzem seus gastos em educação. / [en] This article studies the effects of the Brazilian conditional cash transfer program, the Bolsa Escola Federal, on household expenditures. The dataset used was a survey of household budgets (Pesquisa dos Orçamentos Familiares), which, in providing detailed information regarding family expenditures and the value households received through the Bolsa Escola Federal Program, offers an excellent opportunity to answer the question concerning the destination of the money received through the program. The main result of the article is that households receiving the grant from the program tend to spend more on food and do not reduce their expenditures on education.

Social assistance programmes (SAPs), understood as non-contributory transfers aimed at ad-dressing poverty, have spread in developing countries since the late 1990s. National govern-ments in Latin America have sought to extend the coverage of SAPs through human devel-opment conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs). CCTs share several implementation features. First, they employ targeting and selection methods based on means, and proxy means, tests. Research on targeting and selection methods has evolved hand in hand with the adoption of CCTs in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia. Second, CCTs involve the provision of cash transfers directly to households, but with conditions attached to human development objectives. Transfers are given to households in poverty contingent on investment in the human capital formation of their children. A third feature relates to the presence of programme exit conditions. To date, scarce research is available on the design and outcomes associated with exit condi-tions from CCTs. This thesis thus contributes to the literature in the implementation of SAPs by providing a critical examination of exit conditions in SAPs with specific emphasis on CCTs. The thesis provides a systematic theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of exit conditions in the implementation of CCTs. The thesis develops and tests two basic principles underlying the role of exit conditions. First, the exhausted-effectiveness principle suggests that the effectiveness of a CCT varies over time. The research reported in this examines the effectiveness of programme over time with the aim of identifying potential thresholds after which a given SAP's effectiveness de-clines. A two-period child human capital investment model is developed to study analytically the conditions in which programme effectiveness varies over time. This is examined empirically in order to demonstrate the existence of the time-varying effectiveness associated with the implementation of the Colombia's CCT, Familias en Accion. A continuous treatment effect model is estimated following Hirano and Imbens (2004), in which the length of exposure allows for the graphical analysis of dose-response functions. The results indicate that the design of SAPs must take account of time-varying effectiveness. Second, a principle of the non-recurrence of poverty states that beneficiaries should be able to exit an effective programme when two conditions apply: (i) they are not in poverty; and (ii) they face a low probability of becoming poor in the near future. This principle acknowledges the implications of poverty dynamics for the implementation of SAPs with a particular focus on exit conditions. This thesis characterises the poverty dynamics of beneficiary households through the estimation of a Markovian poverty transition model using data from the Familias en Accion programme. The findings from the empirical work suggest that programme participation should not end when households are non-poor, but attention must be paid to probabilities of recurrence, in order to secure non-recurrence in the near future. Taken together, the exhausted-effectiveness principle interacts with the non-recurrence of poverty principle in the sense that the first sets a maximum length of exposure to the intervention, while the second determines minimum levels of exposure.

<p>The Global South, and particularly Latin America, experienced a remarkable expansion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in the last fifteen years. Although a large literature examines the effects of CCTs on human development, the political behavioral consequences remain underexplored. In the dissertation, I address this gap by analyzing the effects of CCTs on political participation and policy. I also explore the implications of these effects for human development. </p><p>My central argument is that CCTs increase political participation among beneficiaries, and both program transfers and conditionalities contribute to these positive effects. More specifically, CCTs provide beneficiaries with politically relevant resources, including civic skills and access to state officials and community leaders. These resources reduce the costs of political participation and facilitate more involvement in political activities, particularly in more demanding forms of participation. In addition, I argue that CCTs increase the private provision of local services and influence the outcomes of some non-national elections. </p><p>To test this argument, I use four main sources of data: (1) existing survey data from Latin America in 2012; (2) original survey data from Mexico in 2014; (3) experimental data from Mexico in 1998-2000; and (4) in-depth interviews and focus groups from Mexico in 2012. Multilevel models and linear regression models are used to estimate the effects of CCTs on political behavior and service provision. The in-depth interviews and focus groups help to unravel more of the causal mechanism that connects CCTs to political participation. </p><p>The evidence largely supports my argument. I find that CCTs increase participation in a wide variety of political activities, including electoral and non-electoral activities. In addition, the pathways to increased participation include improved civic skills and increased access to state officials and local leaders. Moreover, CCTs increase the private provision of sewerage services.</p><p>I conclude that CCTs have both desirable and undesirable consequences. On the one hand, CCTs increase democratic political participation, improve civic skills, reduce the distance between beneficiaries and government officials, and increase access to local services. The increased access to sewerage services creates an indirect pathway to improved human development outcomes. On the other hand, CCTs reduce the pressure on local officials to provide local services, and in some contexts contribute to electoral rewards for undeserving incumbent parties.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

My thesis explores the conceptual underpinnings of the acclaimed Mexican conditional cash transfer (CCT) program Oportunidades as a way of engaging broader debates about how anti-poverty policy is evolving in the wake of the World Bank’s mid-1990s legitimacy crisis. I am interested in the behaviours and attitudes—or “subjectivities”—that Oportunidades attempts to cultivate amongst participants. Whereas the majority of CCT studies tend to focus on measuring the extent to which the programs “mold” beneficiaries into the categories of being prescribed by the program, my thesis is concerned with specifying and critically examining these categories. I use a hybrid neo-Gramscian, governmentality and critical feminist theoretical framework to probe how Oportunidades beneficiaries are constructed within World Bank and Mexican government discourse, as well as in external program evaluations. I argue that Oportunidades is underpinned by an agent-centred conception of poverty and that the program promotes a kind of gendered market-conducive subjectivity amongst beneficiaries. I conclude by exploring some of the implications of the CCT model. Ma thèse explore les fondements conceptuels du Oportunidades, un programme de transferts conditionnels de fonds (TMC) Mexicain acclamé. J’utilise les TMC comme une ouverture pour élargir le débat sur la manière dont la politique anti-pauvreté évolue dans le sillage de la crise de légitimité à laquelle la Banque Mondiale a fait face dans le milieu des années 1990. Je m'intéresse aux types de comportements et d'attitudes—ou «subjectivités»—que Oportunidades essaye de cultiver chez les participants. Alors que la majorité des études sur les TMC focalisent sur l’évaluation des succès du programme à modeler les participants afin qu’ils entrent dans les catégories de personnes prescrites par le programme, mon but est la spécification et l'examen critique de ces catégories. J'utilise un cadre théorique hybride qui combine néo-gramsciennes, la gouvernementalité et des théories féministes critiques pour enquêter sur la façon dont les bénéficiaires du programme Oportunidades sont construits à l’intérieur du discours de la Banque Mondiale, du gouvernement mexicain, ainsi que dans les évaluations externes du programme. Je soutiens qu’il y a, dans le programme Oportunidades, une conception sous-entendu de la pauvreté centrée sur les comportements des individus et que le programme promeut une subjectivité sexuée des bénéficiaires qui facilite leur participation au marché. Je conclus en explorant quelques implications du modèle TMC.

My thesis explores the conceptual underpinnings of the acclaimed Mexican conditional cash transfer (CCT) program Oportunidades as a way of engaging broader debates about how anti-poverty policy is evolving in the wake of the World Bank’s mid-1990s legitimacy crisis. I am interested in the behaviours and attitudes—or “subjectivities”—that Oportunidades attempts to cultivate amongst participants. Whereas the majority of CCT studies tend to focus on measuring the extent to which the programs “mold” beneficiaries into the categories of being prescribed by the program, my thesis is concerned with specifying and critically examining these categories. I use a hybrid neo-Gramscian, governmentality and critical feminist theoretical framework to probe how Oportunidades beneficiaries are constructed within World Bank and Mexican government discourse, as well as in external program evaluations. I argue that Oportunidades is underpinned by an agent-centred conception of poverty and that the program promotes a kind of gendered market-conducive subjectivity amongst beneficiaries. I conclude by exploring some of the implications of the CCT model. Ma thèse explore les fondements conceptuels du Oportunidades, un programme de transferts conditionnels de fonds (TMC) Mexicain acclamé. J’utilise les TMC comme une ouverture pour élargir le débat sur la manière dont la politique anti-pauvreté évolue dans le sillage de la crise de légitimité à laquelle la Banque Mondiale a fait face dans le milieu des années 1990. Je m'intéresse aux types de comportements et d'attitudes—ou «subjectivités»—que Oportunidades essaye de cultiver chez les participants. Alors que la majorité des études sur les TMC focalisent sur l’évaluation des succès du programme à modeler les participants afin qu’ils entrent dans les catégories de personnes prescrites par le programme, mon but est la spécification et l'examen critique de ces catégories. J'utilise un cadre théorique hybride qui combine néo-gramsciennes, la gouvernementalité et des théories féministes critiques pour enquêter sur la façon dont les bénéficiaires du programme Oportunidades sont construits à l’intérieur du discours de la Banque Mondiale, du gouvernement mexicain, ainsi que dans les évaluations externes du programme. Je soutiens qu’il y a, dans le programme Oportunidades, une conception sous-entendu de la pauvreté centrée sur les comportements des individus et que le programme promeut une subjectivité sexuée des bénéficiaires qui facilite leur participation au marché. Je conclus en explorant quelques implications du modèle TMC.

Oportunidades is a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) that uses a proxy means-test targeting model to select eligible households for the programme. According to the Income and Expenditure Household Survey of 2008, approximately two in every three eligible rural households participate in Oportunidades, whereas only one in every three eligible urban households receives the Oportunidades cash transfer. This research explores the factors behind this lack of take-up, the costs of participation and the implications of targeting inefficiency on the programme’s impact on income poverty. It argues that a sample selection model is a pertinent tool of analysis as it informs on the distribution of cash transfers conditional on household eligibility. This conditional distribution is also used to understand the costs of participation as a latent variable. Eligible households are less likely to invest in human capital and neither the cash transfer nor the income forgone by children and teenagers are sufficient to overcome these costs of participation. By identifying a method to quantify behavioural change of households, I associate the costs of participation to the difficulties of inducing health-related behavioural change among recipients and eligible non-recipients. At an aggregate state level, targeting inefficiency is not fully explained by only looking at the budget constraints of the programme. In fact, targeting efficiency is positively associated to aggregate behavioural change and negatively associated to aggregate costs for participation at state level. Yet, targeting efficiency does not guarantee impact on income poverty and Oportunidades’ highest impact on income poverty also associated with the inclusion of non-eligible households in the programme. This research reconsiders the importance of the context in which CCTs are implemented and informs on the conflicting aims of CCTs: providing income poverty relief via cash transfers and incentivizing behavioural change by conditioning the cash transfer in health and education investment.

Transferências Condicionadas de Renda (TCR), como o Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) no Brasil, são cada vez mais adotadas no mundo para romper com o ciclo de transmissão da pobreza, por meio de transferências monetárias a famílias pobres, condicionadas a investimentos em capital humano. Como cerca de 76% da população pobre do mundo vive em áreas rurais, e a incidência de pobreza é maior em localidades remotas florestadas, os TCR são frequentemente implementados junto a populações semiautárquicas de países em desenvolvimento. Assim, essas transferências têm aumentado a disponibilidade de recursos monetários junto a essas populações, como certos povos indígenas. Nesses contextos, evidências prévias mostram que a monetarização das economias locais pode ter efeitos positivos, negativos ou nulos na dedicação de tempo às atividades de subsistência e no consumo de recursos naturais. Porém, existem duas lacunas nesse conhecimento. Primeiro, estudos prévios avaliaram os efeitos conjuntos de diversas fontes de renda, muito embora estas variem nos investimentos de tempo necessários, de nulos (e.g., TCR e aposentadorias) a altos (e.g., salários e comércio de artesanato). Segundo, a maior parte da literatura assume, ainda que implicitamente, que as decisões na base das escolhas humanas são racionais e motivadas, sobretudo, por maximizar a renda ou, eventualmente, minimizar os riscos. Porém, evidências empíricas e avanços teóricos indicam que as decisões nem sempre são racionais, tanto por limitações cognitivas que levam a outros processos decisórios (e.g., heurísticas), como porque são motivadas por outros fatores (e.g., prazer, emoção, normas sociais). Portanto, esta dissertação teve por objetivo investigar se o aumento da renda monetária de transferências do PBF estava associado a diferenças no investimento de tempo em atividades de subsistência (agricultura, caça, pesca e coleta) e no consumo de produtos derivados ou não dessas atividades pelo povo indígena Kisêdjê da Amazônia brasileira. Além disso, investigou se o hedonismo e a contabilidade mental seriam motivadores dessas decisões. Três hipóteses foram testadas. Primeira, diferentes fontes de renda monetária devem produzir efeitos diversos sobre o tempo dedicado pelos Kisêdjê a atividades de subsistência. Segunda, os efeitos do PBF devem variar de acordo com o quanto as pessoas apreciam cada atividade de subsistência, i.e., o hedonismo é importante para prever investimentos de tempo nessas atividades. Terceira, os Kisêdjê realizam contabilidade mental, i.e., separam o dinheiro em diferentes contas mentais e, portanto, fontes alternativas de renda monetária devem produzir padrões de consumo distintos e fontes de renda de baixo esforço, como o PBF, devem privilegiar o consumo de alimentos ou de bens supérfluos. Para tal, o estudo adotou um delineamento observacional em painel, compreendendo todos (242) os indivíduos adultos (>=16 anos) de 2 comunidades. Os dados foram coletados em dois períodos em 2016 e 2017, por meio de survey por entrevistas estruturadas e experimento em contabilidade mental, e observação direta de alocação de tempo (random-interval instantaneous sampling), sendo analisados por técnicas de estatística descritiva e modelos mistos de regressão. Os resultados mostraram, primeiro, que as transferências do PBF não tiveram efeitos no tempo dedicado às atividades de subsistência, embora outras rendas monetárias (e.g., trabalho regular, aposentadoria) tenham ora aumentado, ora reduzido a probabilidade de investimento de tempo. Segundo, o hedonismo foi mais importante que as fontes de renda monetária para explicar o esforço alocado na atividade de caça para os homens. Por fim, não foram observadas evidências de contabilidade mental, ou seja: (i) o padrão de consumo não diferiu segundo a fonte de renda, mas somente entre homens e mulheres; (ii) com fontes de renda de baixo (e.g. PBF) ou alto esforço, os Kisêdjê estiveram menos propensos a consumir bens supérfluos. Os resultados parecem sugerir que os efeitos do PBF nas atividades de subsistência e no consumo dos Kisêdjê são baixos, muito embora a cobertura ampla tenha dificultado a avaliação. Quanto aos motivadores, os resultados apontam para a importância de investigar outros determinantes além da renda. / Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), such as the Bolsa Família Program (BFP) in Brazil, have increasingly been adopted worldwide to break the cycle of poverty transmission, by transferring cash to poor families, conditional on investments in human capital. As about 76% of the worlds poor live in rural areas, and poverty incidence is higher in remote forested localities, CCTs are frequently implemented in semi-autarkic communities of developing countries. Thus, these transfers have increased the availability of cash income resources to semi-autarkic populations, such as certain indigenous peoples. In this context, prior evidence shows the monetization of local economies has been associated with positive, negative, or null effects on the time allocated to subsistence activities and consumption of natural resources. However, there are two knowledge gaps. First, previous studies evaluated the combined effects of several income sources, although these sources vary on the necessary time investments, from null (e.g., CCTs) to high (e.g., wages and handicrafts trade). Second, most previous studies assume, although implicitly, that decisions which base peoples choices are rational and motivated, above all, on income maximization or, occasionally, risk minimization. However, empirical evidence and theoretical advances indicate that decisions are often not always, either because of cognitive limitations that lead to other decision-making processes (e.g., heuristics), or because they are motivated by other factors (e.g., pleasure, emotion, social norms). Therefore, this dissertation aimed to investigate whether increased levels of cash income from the BFP transfers were associated with differences in time investments in subsistence activities (agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering) and in the consumption of Kisêdjê indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon. Additionally, we investigated if hedonism and mental accounting were the motivators behind these decisions. Three hypotheses were tested. First, alternative income sources should produce different effects on the time allocated by the Kisêdjê to subsistence activities. Second, the effects of BFP should vary, depending on how much people appreciated each subsistence activity, i.e. hedonism is important to predict time investments. Third, Kisêdjê do mental accounting and, therefore, different cash income sources should distinct consumption patterns and low-effort activities such as BFP should increase the likelihood of consuming superfluous food or goods. To do that, we adopted an observational panel design, including all (242) adult individuals (>= 16 years) in 2 communities. Data were gathered in two periods in 2016 and 2017, through a survey based on face-to-face interviews and experiment in mental accounting, direct observations of time allocation by random-interval instantaneous sampling, and were analysed by descriptive statistical techniques and mixed-effects regressions. The results indicated that, first, BFP cash transfers had no effect on the time spent on subsistence activities, although other income sources (e.g., wages, pensions) in certain cases increased, while in others decreased the likelihood of time investments. Second, hedonism was important than cash income sources in explaining the effort allocated to hunting for men. Finally, we did not observe evidences of mental accounting, i.e.: (i) consumption patterns did not differ across income sources, but only between men and women; (ii) with low-effort (e.g., BFP) or high-effort income sources, the Kisêdjê were less likely to consume superfluous goods. Our results suggest that the effects of BFP transfers on subsistence activities and consumption are low, although the high rate of coverage has impaired our analyses. As regards motivations, the results point to the importance of investigating determinants other than income.