PRESENTADORA: Inés Badin (UC Davis)
Inés Badin es candidata al Doctorado por University of California, Davis. Tiene una Maestría en Economía por Johns Hopkins University y es Licenciada en Economía por la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. Se desempeña como Profesora Visitante en UCEMA y previamente fue consultora del Banco Mundial y el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Sus investigaciones se centran en el análisis de la provisión óptima de asistencia y protección social a poblaciones vulnerables en contextos de desarrollo con restricciones de capacidad. Asimismo, estudia cómo las preferencias, creencias y redes sociales de los políticos influyen en las prioridades de gestión y en la implementación de políticas fiscales. 

ABSTRACT: A key challenge in designing social transfer programs is determining who should receive benefits. In developing countries, large informal sectors make income and employment difficult to observe. As countries' administrative capacity expands, income-based means-testing with third-party reporting becomes an increasingly common targeting approach, yet enforcing eligibility thresholds remains fundamentally different when much income remains unverifiable. We study this in the context of Brazil's Bolsa Família, a means-tested program in which eligibility is based on self-reported income, supplemented by annual audits that cross-check declarations against administrative records. Exploiting quasi-random variation in whether a beneficiary's formal employment is visible to the government, we estimate the effect of enforcement on formal labor supply, income reporting, and household composition reporting. Beneficiaries whose employment becomes visible are substantially more likely to update their records, bringing reported labor income more closely in line with administrative records, and to lose benefits, confirming that audits detect ineligible recipients. Yet enforcement induces strategic reporting: beneficiaries shift income reporting toward margins the government cannot verify, partially offsetting the increase in reported income and dampening the impact of enforcement. We find little evidence of real behavioral responses, suggesting that enforcement primarily changes reporting rather than labor supply.

AUTORES: Inés Badin (UC Davis) & Carlos Cavalcante (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

ORGANIZADORES: Departamento de Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Revista Económica

CONTACTO: iie@econo.unlp.edu.ar