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.

Evidence from various academic fields indicates that mental health and income are correlated. Additionally, evidence exists that an increase in income improves psychological well-being and evidence that poor psychological well-being negatively impacts income. The difficulty is that there is no definitive work pinpointing the direction of the causal relationship between income and psychological well-being, but studies are attempting to find out. Hence, this paper attempts to contribute to ongoing work with an IV estimation approach to determine the causal effects of psychological well-being on poverty. Using data provided by Haushofer and Shapiro, this paper finds evidence that an increase in income causes a reduction in depression and stress levels, along with increases in happiness and life satisfaction of the study participants. Additionally, it is found that these improvements in psychological well-being lead to increases in monthly household expenditure, especially health care. Furthermore, these findings indicate that when women receive a cash transfer, a significant proportion of that transfer is devoted to health care. All the estimates presented in the paper indicate that an improvement in economic well-being leads to an improvement in the mental health of the poor, which causes them to spend more and focus more on their health care.

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This dissertation provides program evaluation and policy analysis evidence from USA and Iran. The first chapter studies the impact of paid leave legislation on women employment. We employ California’s first-in-the-nation Paid Family Leave program to draw inference using difference-in-differences and triple differences methods. The change in the employment outcomes for women before and after this program is compared to the change in similar outcomes for a set of control groups. We find that women’s employment increased in the intensive margin but not extensive margin. We also find that wages increased for married prime-age and decreased for highly educated young women. The second chapter provides evidence on the impact of a nation-wide unconditional cash transfer program in Iran on labor supply. As compensation for the removal of bread and energy subsidies in 2011, the government of Iran started monthly deposits of cash into individual family accounts amounting to 29% of the median household income. A popular outcry against the subsidy reform program has focused on the negative labor supply effects of the cash transfers on the poor. We use panel data to study the impact of these transfers on the labor supply of poor households and individuals during the first two years of the program, before inflation reduced their value. We use the exogenous variation in the value of the cash transfers relative to household income to estimate the impact of the transfers on labor supply of individuals using fixed effects method. We also use a difference-in-differences methodology using the variation in the time households first started receiving transfers. Although everyone was eligible to receive cash transfers starting January 2011, about 20 percent of the households who for one reason or another did not submit their application in time, started receiving it three months later. Neither set of results support the hypothesis that cash transfers reduced labor supply as measured by hours of work or probability of employment. The third chapter analyses what happens to the welfare of households and the budget of the government if it implements further price reforms in Iran. Five years into the reform, energy prices in Iran were still well below international levels. The impacts of a gradualist approach to price increase versus a one-off approach are simulated in this chapter. Under the gradualist approach government savings (reduction in foregone earnings) from selling subsidized items will increase by 20.2 trillion Rials or 0.18 percent of GDP in 2014. Half of these savings is needed as transfers to households to keep the poverty rate constant by paying each person 17,059 Rials per month. A one-off price increase would have a large effect on poverty and would require transfers equivalent to 203,775 Rials per person per month. Government savings after transfers would equal 96.4 trillion Rials or 0.87 percent of GDP. / Ph. D.

[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.

This thesis has two main objectives. First, it investigates how social support relationships - embedded within kinship systems, friendship networks and associational groups - contribute to the wellbeing of cash transfer beneficiaries in two urban districts in Ghana. Second, it explores how a formal social protection programme affects the wellbeing of beneficiaries both directly and indirectly via its effect on these other support relationships. The thesis takes the Ghana Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme as a case study, examining how it is implemented in practice within an urban setting, and how social support relationships influence its effect on the wellbeing of cash recipients. Throughout this thesis wellbeing is used as a discursive space for looking at the often neglected non-material dimensions of wellbeing. In particular, it takes a relational wellbeing approach which emphasises how material, emotional and cognitive dimensions of wellbeing are embedded in social relationships. It uses a Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLR) approach, complemented by a qualitative social network analysis to map the constellation of relationships on which urban recipients of LEAP transfers rely, and to explore the motivations and rationalities underpinning them. The findings of the thesis add to existing research on social relationships and cash transfers in Africa by extending the analysis to a contemporary urban context. They challenge the assumption that urban residents can draw upon a vibrant support system, by finding that such relationships can be unreliable, provide inadequate support and can be associated with exclusion and marginalization. In addition, the thesis finds that norms underpinning support relationships are constantly being reshaped and challenged. The thesis also highlights the important but diverse effects that formal social protection programmes can have on material, emotional and cognitive wellbeing of recipients, both directly and indirectly via their effect on other significant social relationships of beneficiaries.

O programa de transferencia de renda Bolsa Familia e um importante pilar da seguri- dade social brasileira, mas ha um senso comum de que as transferencias do programa incentivam casais beneficiarios a terem mais filhos. Utilizando base de dados do governo federal (Cadunico e Caixa) e valendo-se dos criterios de eligibilidade, prop6e-se uma ine- dita analise quase experimental para estudar os efeitos das transferencias nao condicionais (UCT) e das condicionais (CCT) sobre a fecundidade das beneficiarias entre os anos de 2011 a 2015, atraves de uma regressao descontinua fuzzy. Problemas de medida associa- dos a base (e.g.: manipulacao, arredondamento, atrito) sao remediados com a estimacao nao parametrica proposta por Gerard, Rokkanen & Rothe (2016), em que se determina limites superiores e inferiores aos efeitos de tratamento. Por um lado, nao ha evidencia de que o componente CCT afete a fecundidade das beneficiarias, mas por outro, o com- ponente mais flexivel do Bolsa Familia, o UCT, possivelmente reduziu a fecundidade das beneficiarias mais pobres, sobretudo no Nordeste. Tais resultados sao contraintuitivos em relacao a literatura te6rica ate entao, mas em linha com a grande maioria dos resultados encontrados em programas similares da America Latina. / The Brazilian cash transfer program Balsa Familia is a very, if not the most, important pil- lar of Brazil\'s welfare system. However, there is a common sense that the program\'s trans- fers incentive beneficiary couples to have more children. Using federal data (Cadunico and Caixa databases) and the eligibility rules for the program, I propose a quasi-experimental approach to verify both unconditional (UCT) and conditional transfers (CCT) on the beneficiaries\' fertility rates between 2011 and 2015, through a fuzzy regression disconti- nuity approach. Measure problems associated with the data (e.g.: manipulation, heaping, attriton), are solved using a non parametric estimation proposed by Gerard, Rokkanen & Rothe (2016), which determines lower and upper bounds for treatment effects. On one hand, there is no evidence that the CCT component affects the beneficiaries\' fertility rates, but on another, the more flexible component of Bolsa Familia, UCT, possibly reduced the fertility rates for the most poor. Those results are counter intuitive with the theoretical literature so far, but in line with the majority of other studies analyzing similar transfer programs in Latin America.

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

Economics