Cash transfer and female labor supply: evidence from Brazil’s rural area

Abstract

This paper analyzed the relationship between Bolsa Família Program (BFP) and labor supply of women in rural areas from Brazil, using the Propensity Score Matching (with the nearest-neighbor, kernel, and IPW criteria), Ordinary Least Squares on the treatment (beneficiaries), and control (non-beneficiaries) groups with the robustness analysis proposed by Oster (2015). The results showed that the BFP has an opposite effect to the one pronounced in the critiques of the program, the beneficiaries did not have more or fewer work hours than the non-beneficiaries, this fact can be explained by the value of the benefit not being able to meet the expenses of the household. From these results, we can conclude that both tests reinforce the importance of continuing the investigation of the effects on female labor supply in the rural environment in the light of different guidelines.