the lives of the original households. Finally, we find a significant but small difference in the entertainment variable. On non-durable expenditure we find no effects.

Several possible explanations could justify these results. First, as already described, our treatment definition means having additional transfers in the first year of the program, which by now was 20 years ago. These additional resources might have had an effect in the short and medium term, as several papers and reports have shown. However, such effect might not have carried through 2017. Second, we are looking at households that also existed in 1997, which means that they are predominately composed of older members and increasingly headed by females. Being mostly focused towards benefiting the next generations, PROSPERA might yield lower impacts in this older-aged group. Third, the sample might not be large enough to enable researchers to detect statistically significant differences. Fourth, we are using durable assets that in the past have been used to identify eligible (poor) households. This might motivate respondents not to respond truthfully if they believe that the survey could be used as part of the assignment process.<sup>18</sup> Fifth, it is notoriously complex to look at durables expenditures as these are infrequent purchases of wide quality variation, the data available so far do not include the prices of such purchases; further the available data at this stage do not include non-durable or food consumption directly, so that we resort to an imputation method which has clear advantages but also a number of disadvantages as any imputation. The imputation procedure is described, as mentioned, in Appendix C. Sixth, the original households might have passed on to their offspring some of their assets or savings and therefore we might not see a positive difference with the control households. One should bear in mind that PROSPERA by design targets children and therefore it is plausible that the main long-run positive effects are found among those who were the primary target of the policy in terms of health, nutrition, and schooling. While the original households might have had an initial bump in their incomes, that was fairly limited in the original experiment, so that eventually the original control household might have caught up. The same does not need to be true for the treated children as some of the control children, given their age and school grades, might not be affected at all by the late roll out of the program in control localities. For example, those children at the margin of dropping out of school who were in the control villages would have dropped our while their counterparts in treatment villages would have stayed in school.

# **VI.A.2 New Households**

In this section we analyze the effects for durable goods purchase, and imputed consumption expenditures, by the new households as previously defined: these are mostly the offspring of the original households, potentially those children in 1997 that were the target of the policy. As these new households are composed by the direct beneficiaries of the program transfers, they 18With certain regularity PROSPERA gathers a similar survey called ENCASEH, whose purpose is to determine if the households are still in poverty and should stay in the program or not.

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