components. On the demand side, there was an intense psychosocial support through home visits done by local social workers to help households acquire the skills they need to autonomously participate in (and benefit from) the services available to them. On the supply side, the state committed to coordinate different government agencies providing the social services. Many other Latin American countries began looking at this system of integrated social services as an example for their own policies, and a few of them introduced programs that mimic several aspects of CS (such as _Juntos/Unidos_ in Colombia, _Brasil Sem Mis ́eria_ in Brazil and the most recent version of the Oportunidades program in Mexico, called _Prospera_ ).<sup>1</sup> This paper studies short and medium run impacts of CS for households who participated between 2002 and 2006. Our main results focus on four sets of outcomes for which data are available: the take-up of monetary subsidies, which provide short term income support to beneficiaries; participation in training and employment programs; employment of heads of household and their spouses and housing conditions.<sup>2</sup> We find that CS participants increase their take-up of a family allowance for poor children (the Subsidio Unico<sup> ́</sup> Familiar, hereafter SUF) by 11%, relative to an average take-up of 65% among comparable non-participants. We are also able to detect an impact on the uptake of employment programs, of about 5-6% (from a baseline enrolment of 1%), especially in the short run. However, this is not accompanied by improvements in employment outcomes. Finally, we find no evidence of impacts on housing conditions of participant families.

Program impacts on the take-up of subsidies are driven by families not accessing welfare services before CS was implemented (the primary target group), and for families enrolling in CS only after 2004, when the supply of social services expanded. The increase in the uptake of SUF is 22% for families who did not take up these subsidies before 2002, and it lasts up to 4 years after the family entered in CS. If we further condition on having enrolled in CS after 2004, the impact on the take-up of SUF rises to 32%.<sup>3</sup> Similarly, there is a 20% increase in the employment rate of females (spouses of the household head), that were not employed before 2002 and for those in families that enrolled in CS after 2004.

To evaluate the program we use a regression discontinuity design. Families are eligible to participate in CS if a poverty index is below a given threshold, which varies across municipalities and across years. Thus we compare, within municipality and cohort, the outcomes of families

> 1Short term income support combined with the activation and employment support of low income groups are becoming an increasingly important policy tool of social protection strategies in OECD countries (Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012).

> 2The choice of outcomes is dictated by the use of administrative data, which has a more limited set of outcomes than a household survey. The benefit of using administrative records is that we can study the universe of participants in the welfare system, as opposed to a small sample of them. We also analyze nine variables (available for only three years) concerning school enrolment of children, health coverage of children and adults in the household, and participation in employment centers.

> 3Since the baseline take-up of SUF is 65%, this means a change towards nearly universal coverage of this subsidy among eligible families registered in the social welfare system.

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