a significantly larger number of children, while those in the control group shrunk by almost half a person by the 18-month follow-up.

However, it is also possible that a significant amount of this churn in household composition could have been avoided. If a sufficiently small share of refugees is treated within a given network (be it geographic or kin), the pressure for the beneficiaries to share the transfers with others can be high – resulting in smaller than expected treatment effects (Jakiela and Ozier 2016). In such a setting, lowering the eligibility threshold to increase the share of applicants assigned to ESSN would likely reduce the changes in the composition of the treatment group. As the heterogeneity analysis in Figure 3 shows, this would happen because increasing the treatment share at the margin might have disproportionately reduced the number of children sent to another household (as more vulnerable households are more likely to send children out).

The first-best policy response to these findings may well be that programs designed to assist refugees should receive more generous funding so that they can increase the share receiving assistance. However, even when the available funding is fixed, the design of such programs could be potentially improved in a budget-neutral manner: if the program treated a larger group of households, but offered a smaller cash transfer per individual, some of this churn in household composition could be avoided. Such a simple adjustment is likely to be beneficial, as it is unlikely that the separation of children from their immediate families is desirable. Overall, this study suggests that, holding constant a given budget, supporting refugee populations with wider coverage at the expense of a lower per capita transfer may be preferable.

From a targeting perspective, households that reported at least one fewer child at follow-up, regardless of treatment status, are overwhelmingly large (with an average household size of almost eight), more likely to be female-headed, have much lower per capita consumption, and with children less likely to be enrolled in school. These characteristics can be used to increase the share of applicants assigned to beneficiary status. Alternatively, instead of using a list of demographic eligibility criteria, programs can take advantage of routinely collected administrative data on refugees to predict per capita household expenditures (Altındağ et al. 2020), which would help create a continuous score (like the commonly used proxy means test scorecards) that could be used to rank households, and expand/contract the program rolls over time as needed. This was not possible when ESSN was being designed in 2016. Finally, donors can also consider universal child support grants (and, perhaps, old age pensions) for refugee households, meaning that all refugee households would receive modest transfers to support children (and elderly), while cash transfers for able-bodied adults could then be targeted to the most vulnerable among refugee populations.<sup>34</sup>

> 34 For example, UNICEF is currently implementing a conditional cash transfer program for education in Turkey (CCTE), which provides monthly cash transfers to school-aged children of refugees. However, the transfers are not universal and are conditional on regular school attendance.

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