“Poverty and Parental Discipline,” co-authored by Professor of Economics Emily Conover, appears in the March issue of the Journal of Development Economics. The open access article was written with Mo Alloush (Colorado State University, formerly Hamilton) and Susan Godlonton (Williams College). It analyzes a phased implementation of a conditional cash transfer program in Peru, showing that “alleviating the financial strain on parents reduces harsh discipline practices on children.”
Using data from the program the authors showed that parents in poor households are more likely to use physical punishment as a disciplinary practice. They found that in districts where Juntos, Peru’s main poverty alleviation program that started in 2005, was introduced, “physical punishment among impoverished families decreased by at least 2.7 percentage points (an 11% drop), a change primarily driven by a significant reduction in slapping.”
These results “highlight that social safety nets do more than just provide economic stability; they offer important second-order benefits by fostering safer domestic environments and discouraging physical punishments on children,” they said.
Conover and her co-authors say this paper “provides some of the first evidence on the effect of a conditional cash transfer program on parental use of physical punishment,” adding that their “findings complement existing work by showing that conditional cash transfer programs that are common around the world, can also play a role in facilitating changes to parental disciplinary practices.”
Posted April 15, 2026
