Because conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) can address the deep roots of violence, many scholars and policymakers have assumed them to be an effective and innocuous tool to take on the issue. I argue that while CCTs may have positive economic effects, they can also trigger social discord, criminal predation, and political conflict and, in doing so, increase violence. To test this claim, I take advantage of the exogenous shock caused by the randomized expansion of Mexico’s flagship CCT, PROGRESA/Oportunidades. I find that the experimental introduction of the program increased rather than decreased violence. Then, I analyze all the data compiled by LAPOP on the issue over the years. I find that, other things constant, Latin Americans are more exposed to violence and insecurity when they participate in CCTs than when they do not. These findings urge us to reconsider the effects of social programs on violence.

The pandemic declared in 2020 has implied extreme transformations. In the Argentine case, measures were announced to provide relief to the sectors defined as the most affected, within which the so-called emergency family income (EFI) was established. The EFI’s management, implementation, access and collection method underwent a digitalisation process, enabling access through official and nonofficial channels. The nonofficial channels include Facebook Groups, where the recipients of social policies exchange information, doubts and advice. This article, based on virtual ethnography, aims to explore the emotions linked to the management and perception of EFI. In particular, we address a practice that has become relevant in the aforementioned context: waiting. It has been observed that the barriers between registration and access to the EFI transfer have implied different types of waiting on the part of the receiving population. We conclude that waiting has become an operative element in the implementation of social policies.

Benefit-Cost analyses of social programs often involve complex interactions between market and non-market goods. In this paper we outline one conceptual framework for incorporating the general equilibrium effects into benefit-cost analyses of changes in social programs. The goal is to develop models that are capable of capturing the interactions that take place between decisions involving marketed goods together with their effects on non-market goods and the reverse –changes in non-market goods that cause induce changes in decisions about marketed goods. These types of feedback effects are likely to result from large changes in social programs. These effects are compounded by the potential for endogenous realized outcomes that arise as a result of household actions taken in response to proposed policies. To demonstrate the importance of our conceptual discussion of these general equilibrium effects, we present an empirical example of our general equilibrium framework using teacher cuts in response to budget pressures in Maricopa County, Arizona. We find substantial differences in willingness to pay measures between models which account for endogenous education outcomes in a general equilibrium setting and those which ignore the linkages between market (housing) and non-market (education) goods in a partial equilibrium setting