Since 1997, fully noncontributory minimum pensions have been established in many Latin American countries, and have more recently been encouraged as a "zero pillar" of social security by the World Bank and other IFIs. These policies came into being under diverse political regimes and display a range of levels of generosity and universality. Becuase these policies are generally part of a modern bureaucratic welfare state project, they require identity documents, something that many low-income citizens do not possess. States have lowered barriers to the supply of identity documents, and new social policies, like noncontributory pensions and conditional or unconditional cash transfers, have stimulated demand for identity documents among those who do not currently have them. Brazils noncontributory pension, the BPC, has a means test and a large benefit (equivalent to the minimum wage), but requires providing identity documents for all household members. This report discusses the propagation of noncontributory pensions, then examines Brazilian government records to determine the size of the incentive to demand documents in Brazil using a logit model and a more novel survival time regression discontinuity design, raising questions of the relationships between benefit size, universality, document requirements, and poverty. / text

<p dir="ltr">Retail prices for eggs surged during the period from early 2022 to mid-2023 in the U.S. Eggs are important to a wide range of people because of their nutritional benefits and cost relative to other protein sources. Thus, rapidly increasing egg prices can cause risks to numerous people. Using social media listening data, we analyzed the relationship between egg prices and online and social media attention and the relationship between egg prices and online and social media sentiment. Our findings suggest that egg prices are associated with the sentiment of the public as expressed in online media. However, the relationship between egg prices and online and social media attention is complex when studying the timing of increased concern with the timing of online news media coverage. Importantly, by leveraging a method of regression discontinuity in time, we show that online and social media conversations about eggs and egg prices tend to increase after the rapid rise in online news coverage. Similarly, online and social media conversations about eggs and egg prices tend to decrease after the rapid rise in online news coverage. This research also provided an example of how a total number of statements and sentiment score of social media listening data can be utilized to capture people’s attention levels, overall sentiment, and how they change over time.</p>