How can unconditional welfare transfers encourage households to allocate more resources to children? We conducted a nationwide randomized controlled trial in Georgia to test two approaches: providing food vouchers instead of cash and labeling cash transfers to promote child-related spending. Compared to cash alone, we find that labeling transfers significantly increases the share of household expenditure on children. By contrast, infra-marginal food vouchers reduce overall household consumption without altering its composition. This reduction likely stems from the higher shopping costs at voucher-accepting stores. Our findings suggest that subtle

interventions like labeling can avoid the drawbacks of more restrictive, paternalistic policies.

The dependency on imported essential production inputs poses a threat of abrupt price hikes and shortages, potentially triggered by political events. The energy crisis resulting from the Russian war of aggression is an example. This paper investigates whether governments should bolster production via transfers or cost subsidies in the event of a crisis, utilizing a dynamic multi-sector economic model that is calibrated to Germany and incorporates endogenous firm entry and exit. Our findings suggest that subsidizing production costs is more beneficial for economic activity and welfare, provided the energy demand due to the subsidy does not significantly influence the price of the essential production input. If it does, this approach could become exceedingly expensive. In such scenarios, it is economically more efficient to provide lump-sum transfers to firms. The effectiveness of these policies ultimately hinges on their impact on the price of the imported input.

Cash transfer programmes have come to dominate government efforts to reduce poverty. Whilst effective at providing short-term relief, these programmes may also undermine long-term poverty reduction by disincentivising labour supply. To study whether cash transfers enhance or depress labour supply, I measure the effect of an exogenous increase in Brazil's main cash transfer on the labour supply of men and women. I find no effect for men, while women increase their labour supply by 7.4% over two years. This is driven by mothers, for whom the transfer relaxes childcare constraints, enabling them to join the labour force. Leveraging discontinuities on the allocation of education funds to Brazil's 5570 municipalities, I find that the effect is stronger in areas receiving more education funds. Overall, my paper illustrates that there is no trade-off between short-term relief and long-term poverty reduction. Rather, cash transfers encourage women’s labour force participation, particularly when complementary public goods are available.

We consider the effect of childcare attendance and maternal employment on the health outcomes of young children in a low-income setting. We exploit exogenous variation introduced by a randomized childcare subsidy program in an urban informal settlement in Kenya which provided mothers of 1 to 3 year-olds with 12 months of fully subsidized childcare. We find positive effects of increased childcare attendance on the probability of experiencing symptoms of communicable illness, which we attribute to increased exposure to disease in group settings. Our evidence points to the possibility that the income effect from the subsidy offsets this negative effect. We find little effect of maternal employment on child health, with the exception of improved overall child health reported by mothers with children already in care prior to the intervention. The intervention also included a quality enhancement treatment arm, but we find little evidence of any additional effect on child health.