Cash transfers have emerged over the last two decades as one of themost widespread and highly researched poverty interventions. The use ofcash transfers to create a Basic Minimum Income (BMI) has become animportant policy debate. Extensive research has been carried out on theimpact of both conditional and unconditional cash transfers. Some of thisevidence finds that cash transfers can lead to long-term, transformativeeffects on economic well-being, while in other contexts, the effects appear tobe limited to increases in short-term consumption. This paper reviews theliterature on the impacts of cash transfers. It then presents a simple modelthat seeks to understand when we can expect cash transfers to havetransformative effects in which the income of recipients transitions to asignificantly and sustainably higher level. Behavioral extensions to themodel show how responses to cash transfers may change when we accountfor endogenous discount rates, cognitive ability, and aspirations.

We estimate the impact of U.S. political identity on COVID-19 safety behaviors, cases, and deaths. Our data set merges U.S. county-level data on mask-wearing, cell-phone mobility, vaccination rates, county characteristics, and variables reflecting conservative political identity with COVID-19 cases and deaths from the first 12, 20, and 28 months of the pandemic in the United States. State-level fixed-effect estimations controlling for county characteristics indicate every 10 percentage point increase in the county popular vote for President Trump in the 2020 election to be associated with a 0.36σ reduction in a COVID-safety index, 1,798 additional COVID cases, and 31.9 COVID deaths per 100,000 county residents in the initial 28 months of the pandemic. Further, we ask whether differential behavioral responses during the pandemic can be explained by traditional strains of American conservatism, or are associated with a more specific Trumpian identity. We create state-level indices of traditional libertarian and social conservatism, finding that these indices display little systematic explanatory power over COVID-safety behaviors, cases, and deaths relative to 2020 Trump voter support.

This paper describes emerging work in development economics at the intersection of hope, poverty and material prosperity. We blend Sen’s capability approach and Snyder’s hope theory to provide a conceptual framework for integrating hope into development eco-nomics. This framework emphasizes the interplay of internal and external constraints, belief updating and differential malleability of hope between children and adults. The paper then surveys the recent literature in development economics related to Snyder’s components of hope: aspirations, pathways and agency. This survey focuses primarily on the domains of education, employment and enterprise and uses the Sen-Snyder framework to synthesize patterns in these results. It concludes with a discussion of promising research frontiers for development economists, including the need to understand how complementarities between hope components shape realized outcomes and to accommodate distinctive features of hope as it is experienced by the poor in non-Western contexts.

Nearly 5.6 million Syrian refugees were displaced by the country’s civil war, of which 50% percent are children. Given the heightened risks of psychological distress for this population it is critical to efficiently and accurately assess well-being for this population for intervention. A digital analysis of features in children’s drawings potentially represents a rapid, cost-effective, and non-invasive method for collecting individual and aggregate data on children’s mental health. Using data collected from free drawings and self-portraits from over 2,500 Syrian refugee children in Jordan across two distinct datasets, we use regression and Lasso machine-learning techniques to understand the relationship between exposure to violence and different measures of psychological trauma. Our results suggest that individual drawing characteristics are strongly correlated with validated measures of psychological trauma and past exposure to violence, with child mental health declining with increased exposure to violence and improving with resettlement in host communities. These results serve as a proof-of-concept for the potential use of children’s drawings as a diagnostic tool in human crisis settings.

Cleft Lip/Palate (CLP) is a congenital orofacial anomaly appearing in approximately one in 700 births worldwide. While in high-income countries CLP is normally addressed surgically during infancy, in developing countries CLP is often left unoperated, potentially impacting multiple dimensions of life quality. Previous research has frequently compared CLP outcomes to those of the general population. But because local environmental and genetic factors both contribute to the risk of CLP and also may influence life outcomes, such studies may present a downward bias in estimates of both CLP status and restorative surgery. Working with the non- profit organization Operation Smile, this research uses quasi-experimental causal methods on a novel data set of 1,118 Indian children to study the impact of CLP status and CLP correction on the physical, psychological, and social well-being of Indian teenagers. Our results indicate that adolescents with median-level CLP severity show statistically significant losses in indices of speech quality (-1.55), academic and cognitive ability (-0.43), physical well-being (-0.35), psychological well-being (-0.23), and social inclusion (-0.35). We find that CLP surgery improves speech if carried out at an early age, and that it significantly restores social inclusion.