different scales. Important emphasis is placed on the often-overlooked _time_ dimension of receiving transfers by eligible households, along with highlights about _geographical_ and _gender_ dimensions of the management of social transfers. Our analysis innovates on existing social protection targeting strategies to document that the quarter or month of disbursing transfers to households is crucial for the Nigerien society. In particular, we illustrate that households are better able to dampen the impacts of shocks on consumption levels if social assistance is received within the second quarter of the calendar year; not so for the other quarters. This result is concurrently evidence against the long-standing _incentive-hypothesis_ which implies that providing social assistance to households can create incentive effects and thereby cause households to become more sensitive to external shocks for private behavioral reasons.

While traditional cash transfer schemes to beneficiary households are delivered on a monthly basis, the time _viz_ month and quarter for receiving other social schemes can vary, e.g., short-term food aid; cash for work. In addition, the regular monthly cash transfers may be unavailable to some regions in the country.<sup>3</sup> Estimation of effects exploits the variations in dates of the year of receiving social transfers and the distribution of realized shocks. The use of panel data sets on social support systems (e.g., unemployment insurance; food stamps, etc.) is common for research in developed countries, but in developing countries such data have historically been unavailable for research. The combination of rich household level data and novel empirical frameworks

> 3 **An Implementation Review** : It is useful to review briefly the implementation and _targeting mechanisms_ of other cash transfers (CTs) in Niger. This is an anthropological commentary which is due Olivier de Sardan et al. 2014; who conducted qualitative surveys across beneficiary villages in Niger to understand how other CTs offered by NGOs are practically implemented/targeted. The mechanism involves 3 steps. First: there exist established agencies that provide early warning information on municipalities and villages e.g., risks of droughts, floods, malnutrition to the support agencies. Second: the support agencies or NGOs will then select some villages as beneficiary villages based on vulnerability indicators provided in the first stage. Third: once the beneficiary villages are determined, enumerators conduct door-to-door visits within the villages to pin down the more vulnerable households to become beneficiaries of the CTs. Household's wealth and asset holdings are non-systematically used to determine eligibility thresholds for CTs. For example, households that have fewer than 3 cows or goats may be considered vulnerable and thus eligible for CTs. The third and last stage is the most contentious part of the CT system. Conflicts are common between potential beneficiary and non-beneficiary households due to the non-systematic nature of selecting households and perceived unfairness of the eligibility thresholds by households. In response, in some villages —to avoid village level and inter-household conflicts— the village head re-collects all disbursed funds and then either redistributes funds uniformly to the whole community or puts the funds into public coffers to become communitywide public good. There exists also a bribery component where the households who receive the CTs provide a share to the village leader to avoid the re-collection process. In some cases, the enumerators rely on village heads to decide on households’ vulnerability and eligibility for the CTs. The village head's influence in this further exacerbates the bribery. This is especially the case given that once a household is denoted eligible, the household may receive the assistance for a long period of time.

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