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This study investigates the impact of Indonesia’s flagship conditional cash transfer (CCT) program—PKH—on violent crime. Exploiting data from a randomized controlled trial and administrative data from the staggered nationwide program roll-out in combination with different causal identification strategies, we show that communities receiving access to the CCT experienced an increase in violent crime.  Examining possible mechanisms, our analysis reveals that the program resulted in an increase in idleness among non-targeted male youth within beneficiary households, which we believe contributed to the rise in violent crime. In contrast, we show that the surge in violent crime is neither related to PKH increasing the (monetary and non-monetary) rewards for committing crime nor to alternative reductions in the (material, psychic, punishment-related) costs of engaging in crimes.

Krisztina Kis-Katos is Professor for International Economic Policy at the University of Göttingen. She studied Economics in Szeged and Konstanz, attended the Swiss Doctoral Program at the Study Center Gerzensee, and received her doctoral degree in Economics in 2010 at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research interests lie in the fields of applied development economics and political economy. Her recent research projects focus on the effects of (de-)globalization and more generally of macro-economic processes or related public policies on a range of social and economic outcomes, including labor market and firm outcomes, land use change and deforestation, or conflict.

Dorottya Szikra, PhD is Research Professor and Head of Research Department at the Centre for Social Sciences and Visiting Professor at CEU Vienna. She is the country-lead of the WelfareExperiences ERC project headed by the King's College London, investigating experiences and feelings of benefit claimants in five countries. Szikra also does research on democratic backsliding, populism and the welfare state (See Szikra, D. & K.G. Öktem. An illiberal welfare state emerging? Welfare efforts and trajectories under democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey and Bartha, A., Zs. Boda and D. Szikra. When Populist Leaders Govern: Conceptualising Populism in Policy Making. In. Politics and Governance, 2020.8(3).) The outcome of her investigations into welfare state and family policies in Eastern Europe is a comparative monograph with Cristina Rat and Tomasz Inglot, 2022. Mothers, Families or Children? Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, 1945-2020. University of Pittsburgh Press. Between 2016 and 2020 she acted as the co-chair of the European Social Policy Analysis Network (ESPAnet). She has acted as a member of the editorial boards of various journals, including the European Journal of Social Security, the Hungarian on-line journal socio.hu and the Journal of European Social Policy. Between 2021 and 2022 she served as a member of the EC commissioned High-Level Group on the future of social protection and of the welfare state in the EU.