the program. They find small impacts of the program across a variety of dimensions. As mentioned above, the exclusive focus on the early stages of the program may be misleading because CS may not be working at full capacity. Similarly, their estimator that may be subject to likely violations of the common trends assumption.

Sarsoza and Urzua (2012) also study this program using the RD strategy introduced in Galasso (2006) and refined in this paper, and similar administrative records, but their focus is on children’s outcomes. They use only on the first cohort of CS and focus on test scores of children, which are obtained from school records merged with program records.

Thus, CS is a program of general interest because it is a serious attempt to integrate several welfare services to tackle social exclusion, and because of its objective of connecting the most disadvantaged families in society to the welfare system in a sustained way. The central ideas behind a program such as CS are stressed in Banerjee and Duflo (2007) and in Duflo’s (2012) Tanner lectures. The program seeks to tackle information and psychological barriers that the extra poor face in activating the demand for social programs (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013).<sup>6</sup> The home visits are central to help households acquire the skills they need to autonomously participate in (and benefit from) the welfare, education and health systems available to them. The monetary subsidies obtained as a result of the program may have beneficial effects on the school achievement for poor children as demostrated in many settings (see Paxson and Schady, 2010, for the effects of a cash-transfer in Ecuador, and Dahl and Lochner, 2012, for the US).<sup>7</sup> The increase in access to monetary subsidies and services for households previously disconnected from the welfare system is important not only because families are able to supplement their income through them, but also because they become more linked to the social protection system.

However, even a program as innovative such as CS is not able to transform the lives of the poorest families along key long term welfare outcomes, such as employment and housing. The take-up of employment programs is not accompanied by improvements in employment outcomes. Finally, we find no evidence of impacts on housing conditions of participant families. The target population is difficult to work with, lacking the right set of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and working capital and psychological endowments. Our results provide support that the personalized social support provided by a program such as CS helps to stimulate the use of social services by families. We suggest that the use of employment services may improve employment outcomes when the supply side is tailored to the needs of the families and made available to them. A more

> 6The literature examining the take of social programs describes three leading causes of low take-up of social programs among the poor: lack of information about the program, high transaction costs, and stigma (Moffitt, 1983). Currie, 2006, puts emphasis on the costs of learning about and applying for a given program as a major deterrent for take-up of social programs. Currie’s review suggests that stigma plays a smaller role compared to other motives.

> 7The extra income brought home by access to SUF can explain why Sarsoza and Urzua, 2012, find a decrease in school dropout among children 14 years old associated to CS.

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