Cash is Queen - Impacts of conditional cash transfers on women’s empowerment

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates the causal effects of the Peruvian conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, Juntos, on women’s empowerment defined along the psychological and familial dimensions. Usually, the main goal of CCTs is to reduce poverty. Women are key actors in the fulfillment of conditions and recipients of the transfer, and can thus also be affected by the program in terms of empowerment. This analysis is performed using data from three rounds of the Young Lives Study (YLS) between the years of 2006 and 2013. We estimate the effects by combining a Difference-in-Difference (DD) approach and the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) with Nearest Neighbor Matching (NNM). We look at the psychological dimension in terms of four aspects and construct the following outcome variables; self-esteem, self-efficacy, outlook on future and value to others. We also investigate the potential effect of the program on domestic violence. We find an increase in self-esteem and a reduction in domestic violence as a result of Juntos. We find some significant positive results for the remaining outcome variables but the findings are not robust. The results hold using the Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting (IPTW) as an alternative way of matching.