Cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages. This effect operates through insurance and credit markets: ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings. Thus, the transfers benefit the local economy at large; looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates their impact. One should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy, rather than on the treated only, and use a village-level randomization, rather than selecting treatment nd control subjects from the same community. (JEL H23, I38, O12, O15)

, and NYU for comments. Thanks to Compartamos Banco, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation for funding support to the project and researchers. All opinions are those of the researchers, and not of the donors, Compartamos Banco, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research team has retained complete intellectual freedom from inception to conduct the surveys and estimate and interpret the results. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

I use experimental data for the evaluation of Oportunidades to study the determinants of domestic violence and alcohol abuse. The program, a combination of cash transfers to women and human capital investments, decreases husbands' alcohol abuse by 15% and changes their aggressive behavior depending on transfer size, husbands' education, and spousal age gap. While small transfers decrease violence by 37% for all households, large transfers increase the aggressive behavior of husbands with traditional views of gender roles, probably because their wife's entitlement to a large transfer threatens their identity. This evidence rejects standard unitary, collective, and bargaining models for this latter group of households. It also shows that, while targeting women as recipients of micro-credit or other welfare programs may have additional beneficial effects by reducing alcoholism and domestic violence in most households, the risk of violence may increase for some.

This paper shows that poor households' entitlement to an exogenous, temporary, but guaranteed income stream increases Mexican migration to the U.S., although this income is mainly consumed. Some households use the entitlement to this income stream as collateral to finance the migration. The new migrations come from previously-constrained individuals and households and worsen migrant skills. In sum, financial constraints to international migration are binding for poor Mexicans, some of whom would like to migrate but cannot afford to. As growth and anti-poverty and micro-finance programs relax financial constraints for the poor, low-skilled Mexican migration to the U.S. will likely increase.JEL code: J61, O12, O15, F22.

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