Target What? The Foundations of Poverty Targeting -- by Rema Hanna, Emily Breza, Benjamin A. Olken, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Gideon Moore

This paper is dedicated to Gary Becker, whose insightful seminar questions many years ago about the difference between the subjective level of utility and subjective marginal utility inspired us to collect the data we use in this paper. ⓡ The author order was randomized using the AEA author randomization tool. We thank Binta Zahra Diop, Tishara Garg, Ben Golub, Ravi Jagadeesan, Eva Lestant, Dev Patel, Joao Pugliese, Anirudh Sankar as well as participants at the IIMB Economics Workshop and the Mathias Dewatripont Birthday Conference. We thank Clotaire Boyer, Jack Shane and Youssef Assarssah for research assistance. The original data collection for this project was financially supported by the World Bank, AusAID, and 3ie. The Government of Indonesia provided administrative data used for this project. Banerjee and Olken are Directors of J-PAL, Hanna and Olken are Co-Directors of J-PAL's Southeast Asia Office, and Breza is a member of the NBER Board of Directors. This project was approved by the MIT IRB with protocol number 0912003624, and registered in the AEA Social Science Registry with protocol number AEARCTR-0000099. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Disclosure Statement for Rema Hanna

• I am on a scientific director of J-PAL-SEA at MIT. J-PAL has no stake in the outcomes of any given evaluation results. However, J-PAL does have a position on what is considered a rigorous evaluation methodology.

• I co-direct the JPAL / CID Social Protection Initiative, which receives funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Livelihoods Impact Fund, the Norwegian Agency for Development Corporation, and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. I have received summer salary support as part of directing this Initiative.

• In the past 5 years, I have received research funding for social-protection related research from Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the JPAL Governance Initiative, the JPAL Innovations in Government Initiative, KOICA, and the United States Agency for International Development/ DIV.