A comment on "Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia"
Cahyadi et al. (2020) examine the cumulative effects of conditional cash transfer programs in Indonesia after 2 and 6 years. They find beneficial effects for several of the indicators targeted by the cash transfer programme. They find a substantial increase in childcare using trained professionals, the number of under-15 out of school fell by half, and stunting fell by 23 per cent. By contrast, they found no transformative economic change for the households that received crash transfers. We successfully computationally reproduced the main results of the paper. Additionally, we successfully used a fake treatment as a placebo and showed that the results are robust against the omission of control variables. Moreover, we could verify the coding of two variables, which we tested and confirmed to correspond to the WHO definition.
JEL-Klassifikation: I21, I38, J13, J24, O15