Spilling over

摘要

INCENTIVES ARE central to welfare systems. In developing countries some "conditional cash-transfer" programmes offer families on low incomes benefits only if the children are sent to school and vaccinated. Payments may be suspended if they do not meet the conditions, but relatively little is known about how recipients respond. A trio of papers written by Fernanda Brollo of the University of Warwick, Katja Kaufmann of Mannheim University and Eliana La Ferrara of Bocconi University, and presented at the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society last month, examine the far-reaching spillovers of enforcing conditionality.