| Abstract: |
Many popular social programs have limited coverage among households at the
very bottom of the income and wealth distribution. If a program reaches the
poor, but neglects the destitute, the (pre-program) income distribution of
participants and non-participants will cross. We are interested in the
statis-tical methods that can be used to test for this particular pattern of
program participation. Our numerical simulations suggest that recently
developed tests for distribution crossing are powerful even when the two
distributions under study are fairly similar and they can be usefully combined
with more stan-dard quantile tests to characterize program participation among
the very poor. We apply this approach to data on household expenditures and
membership of micro-credit groups in India and find that participation among
the poorest households in the study area was lower than that of slightly
richer households. |