We study whether transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women decrease the incidence of spousal abuse. We examine the impact of the Mexican Oportunidades program on spousal abuse rates and threats of violence using data from a specialized survey. Beneficiary women are 40 percent less likely to be victims of physical abuse, but are more likely to receive violent threats with no associated abuse. This evidence is consistent with a model of decision-makers' interactions with asymmetric information in the male partner's gains to marriage, who can then use threats of violence to extract rents from their female partners. (JEL D82, J12, J16, K42, O15, O17)

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This paper studies whether households make Pareto-efficient intra-household resource allocation decisions. It sets out a new empirical test of the collective model that exploits exogenous variation in two distribution factors -variables affecting the resource sharing rule within households. Such variation is necessary to test the condition that consumption good demand responses are proportional to changes in the distribution of decision-makers' resources. Combining randomized variation in women's income generated by the experimental evaluation of the PROGRESA program in rural Mexico with general household income variation attributable to localized rainfall shocks, we find evidence favoring the Pareto-efficiency condition. More specifically, we find that female-specific income changes have a substantial positive effect on food expenditures and expenditures on children's goods, whereas income changes due to rainfall shocks have a smaller influence on household public goods expenditures. The evidence is consistent with female partners having greater marginal willingness-to-pay sensitivity to own-income changes, and social norms which may oblige women to devote their earnings to meet collective consumption needs.

This paper identifies neighborhood peer effects on children's school enrollment decisions using experimental evidence from the Mexican PROGRESA program. We use exogenous variation in the school participation of program-eligible children to identify peer effects on the schooling decisions of ineligible children residing in treatment communities. We find that peers have considerable influence on the enrollment decisions of program-ineligible children, and these effects are concentrated among children from poorer households. These findings imply that policies aimed at encouraging enrollment can produce large social multiplier effects. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Using U.S. state-level data we show that agglomeration externalities influence the level of foreign-invested capital in a location. Our empirical model allows the separation of agglomeration effects from the rate of capital stock adjustment, two forces that previous research has conflated. We estimate an agglomeration elasticity of investment of 0.11 to 0.15 with respect to same-source-country investment, lower than previous estimates. We also investigate the influence of state policies and find that although general investment incentives do not affect the location of FDI, targeted policies such as unitary taxation and state foreign offices influence investment. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Does monitoring corrupt activities induce a sustained reduction in corruption? Using longitudinal data on audits of municipal governments in Puerto RicoIn a well-functioning representative democracy, citizens select publicly motivated and competent politicians to administer public affairs and hold them accountable for their performance. To succeed in these tasks, citizens must have appropriate information about candidates' characters, abilities, and actions while in office (Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999; Besley 2006). Accordingly, a growing body of research finds that voters' access to evaluations of politician performance enhances government responsiveness, reduces corruption and rent-seeking behaviors, and promotes electoral accountability in the short run.1 However, it is not well understood whether monitoring and information dissemination policies can generate a sustained

work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any noncommercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of the IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.Cataloging-in-Publication data provided by the Inter-American Development Bank Felipe Herrera Library This paper provides evidence of the long-term relationship between male-tofemale spousal violence and the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program. It uses data from three nationally representative surveys that include detailed information on the prevalence of spousal abuse and threats of violence against women. Constructing comparable groups of beneficiary and nonbeneficiary households within each village to minimize potential selection biases, the present study finds that, in contrast to the short-run estimates, physical and emotional abuse rates over the long term do not differ significantly between existing beneficiary and nonbeneficiary couples. The paper examines possible causes for the difference, most importantly, the role that marital selection and the diffusion of norms rejecting intimate partner violence may play in explaining these effects.JEL codes: D03, J12, J16

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. We employ a randomized control trial that reduced household vulnerability through a development intervention: constructing residential water cisterns in drought-prone areas of Brazil. This intervention significantly decreased requests for private goods from politicians, especially among citizens likely to be in clientelist relationships. We also link program beneficiaries to electronic voting machines, and show the intervention decreased votes for incumbent mayors, who typically have more resources for clientelism. Findings are observed not only during the election campaign, but also a full year later.