10,000 for two years (US$15.95, $38.95 PPP). Yearly benefits correspond to about 11 percent of household consumption for the targeted poor, rural households.<sup>6</sup> The program is financed by the World Bank has had high visibility as it is managed by a safety nets unit in the office of the prime minister. It reached approximately 100,000 beneficiary households between 2012 and 2019 and has continued to expand. The cash transfers are unconditional but delivered together with parenting and child development promotion activities, as well as with complementary interventions to diversify livelihoods. The program did not have a specific objective to foster peace,<sup>7</sup> but questions on the linkages between cash transfers and conflict have become salient over time with the deterioration of the security situation in the Sahel.

The cash transfer program reached all eight regions of the country, and the selection of villages was randomized through public lotteries before using poverty targeting to select beneficiary households. In particular, geographical targeting was first applied within each region to select “communes” (middle-sized geographical units containing several villages) with the highest poverty rates. Within each selected commune, public lotteries to select beneficiary villages took place in the presence of village chiefs and commune and regional authorities.<sup>8</sup> Next, to determine beneficiary households within the selected villages, poverty-targeting methods were applied.<sup>9</sup> Finally, within the selected households, the recipient of the cash transfers was an adult woman, typically the (first) wife of the household head.

Our main explanatory variable is the assignment of a given village to the cash transfer treatment through the public lotteries within communes. To construct this variable, we rely on the national locality registry and an administrative database from the national cash transfer program. Specifically, we obtained a geo-localized list of the 1,190 villages that benefited from cash transfers at any point between 2012 and 2019.<sup>10</sup> We then merged this administrative data set with the national locality registry to identify which locality was assigned to the cash transfer program within each commune. The remaining localities became the pool of control localities.<sup>11</sup> Our village data set characterizes which villages were assigned or not assigned to the cash transfer program, but it does not contain much information on covariates. It includes population numbers at the village level (estimated from a 2012 population census), as well as population numbers for the administrative units to which the village is mapped (commune, department, and region). We document further below the balance in locality populations and the absence of pre-trend in incidence between treatment and control localities.<sup>12</sup>

> 6For a more detailed account of the “Filets Sociaux” cash transfer program, see Premand and Barry (2022); Bossuroy et al. (2022).

> 7For the same reason, this dimension was not the focus of the original RCT designed to analyze the program.

> 8Lotteries were initially introduced for a randomized control trial of the first phase of the program (Premand and Barry 2022). Program implementers found the public lotteries helpful to select beneficiary villages in a context of overwhelming need but limited data with which to rank villages by poverty level. In particular, the transparency of the public lotteries shielded them from interference and complaints, and they continued to use them for purely operational reasons after the initial trial. As such, the paper is not based on a specific trial, but instead uses secondary, observational data as part of a larger natural experiment.

> 9Premand and Schnitzer (2021) describe the household targeting methods in detail and analyze their performance.

> 10We worked with the national cash transfer project office to collect geo-coordinates for a subset of beneficiary villages that were not already geo-localized.

> 11Note that the agency that implements the cash transfer program is used to perform public lotteries, which have been ascertained to achieve a good balance in the smaller-scale trials in which household survey micro-data were collected (Bossuroy et al. 2022; Premand and Barry 2022). We rely on the locality registry as we could not obtain the list of localities that entered the public lotteries in each commune outside the samples from those smaller-scale RCTs.

> 12Merging the administrative data set and the locality registry presented two slight complications. First, the cash transfer program considered villages as the targeting unit, but this is not a formal administrative unit. Smaller “hamlets” may, at times, be considered part of a village and, at other times, a stand-alone community. Second, small villages were not considered eligible for the cash transfer program or were, at times, grouped with neighboring villages to facilitate implementation. Eligible villages were listed commune by commune, without strict rules that we could apply across the full locality database. When we use population data from the 2012 national census, we find that the pool of all the control localities in the locality registry is slightly smaller than the pool of treatment localities. This is consistent with hamlets or small villages being filtered out during the cash transfer program’s targeting process. In communes where we find that non-treatment localities are smaller on average, we trim the smallest localities until (i) we get balance in population size within the commune or (ii) the smallest remaining locality has no more than 250 individuals (approximately 25

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