Research

Housing assistance programs are among the most widely used policies to provide affordable housing to low-income families worldwide. In this paper, we study a large-scale subsidized housing program in Brazil and estimate its effects on individuals who received their homes as adults and those who were exposed as children. We find that adult beneficiaries experience small declines in formal employment. Unlike in other settings, these effects are not driven by spatial isolation, but are instead consistent with modest income effects. In contrast, the impacts on children are large and transformative. Those who receive subsidized housing at age 11 are 22 percent more likely to hold a formal job at age 25 than those who receive their homes at age 18 or older. These gains are concentrated among children of the poorest families and are driven by the proximity to high-quality schools.

Input subsidy programs (ISP) often have two conflicting targeting goals: selecting individuals with the highest marginal return to inputs on efficiency grounds, or the poorest individuals on equity grounds, allowing for a secondary market to restore efficiency gains. To study this targeting dilemma, we implement a field experiment where beneficiaries of an ISP were selected via a lottery or a local committee. In lottery villages, we find evidence of displacement of private fertilizer and of a secondary market as beneficiaries are more likely to sell inputs to non-beneficiaries. In contrast, in non-lottery villages we find no evidence of displacement nor of elite capture. The impacts of the ISP on agricultural productivity and welfare are limited, suggesting that resources should be directed at complementary investments, such as improving soil quality and irrigation.