Tackling Social Exclusion: Evidence from Chile
This paper studies an innovative welfare program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program eligibility is a discontinuous function of an index of family income and assets. The analysis finds strong and lasting impacts of the program on the take-up of subsidies and employment services. These impacts are concentrated among families who had little access to the welfare system prior to the intervention.