Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia: Dataset.” American Economic Review

Targeted social safety net programs have become an increasingly common tool to address poverty (Coady, Grosh, and Hoddinott 2004). In developed countries, the selection of the beneficiaries for these programs (“targeting”) is frequently accom-plished through means-testing: only those with incomes below a certain threshold are eligible. In developing countries, however, where most potential recipients work in the informal sector and lack verifiable records of their earnings, credibly imple-menting a conventional means test is challenging. Consequently, in developing countries, there is an increased emphasis on target-ing strategies that do not rely on directly observing incomes. In particular, there are two main types of strategies that we consider in this paper: proxy means test