Income and Substitution Effects of Brazil’s Bolsa Família Program

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become an increasingly utilized practice in development economics over the past 20 years, and there is evidence that they can have substantial positive impacts on the communities in which they are implemented. This project evaluates the income and substitution effects of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia Program (BFP), a large-scale CCT program, on health. Conditions for receiving BFP include completing health activities such as vaccination, antenatal checkups, and physical exams for children under 6. Using large-scale longitudinal data of over 40 million beneficiaries, researchers measure the importance of conditionality, using child health outcomes as an indicator. The project also seeks to discover when and where conditionality is most effective, for example, for populations living in extreme poverty or within a certain geographic region.