Tackling social exclusion: evidence from Chile

We study an intensive social programme in Chile that combines home visits to households
in extreme poverty with guaranteed access to social services. The goal of the programme
was to connect marginalized families to the social system, which, in turn, should lead to improvements in their living conditions. Programme impacts are identified using a regression
discontinuity design, that explores the fact that programme eligibility is a discontinuous function of an index of family income and assets. There is no evidence of short- or long-term
effects of the programme on employment or housing outcomes. However, we find short- and
medium-term impacts of the programme on the take-up of subsidies and employment services,
which are concentrated among families who had little access to the welfare system prior to the
intervention.