The Effect of COVID-19 Cash Transfers on Health and Well-being of Adolescents: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Russia

Abstract

This paper investigates the causal impact of direct cash transfers on health, well-being, and life satisfaction among adolescents in Russia during the pandemic years. We study an unanticipated introduction of a COVID-19 state support policy for families with children in the form of two one-off transfers (140$ each) for all children younger than 16 years on the date of the policy approval. Our quasi-experimental design takes advantage of the sharp age discontinuity allowing us to compare the health and well-being of adolescents marginally eligible and marginally ineligible for these cash transfers using the data from a Russian longitudinal survey. The panel structure of the survey data enables the difference-in-difference approach as we control for past values of the outcome variables in the pre-pandemic year. We find a significant positive effect of cash transfers on adolescents’ material well-being, life satisfaction, and self-assessed health in the first and second pandemic years. Placebo estimations and various robustness tests confirm the validity of our results.

Note:
Funding Information: No funding was received for this project.

Conflict of Interests: We declare no conflict of interest.

Keywords: COVID-19, cash transfers, health, life satisfaction, quasi-experiment, Russia

JEL Classification: H51, H84, O12, O23