Liqiu Zhao is currently an associate professor at the School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Leuven in 2012. Her research interests include topics on human capital development, gender economics, and migration. Her papers have been published in Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Health Economics. 

This paper examines the impact of early life exposure to unconditional cash transfer on adolescents’ cognitive skills. I exploit the variation across communities and over birth cohorts in exposure to the minimum living standard guarantee (Dibao) program in rural China and apply a difference-in-differences strategy. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, I find that one additional year of exposure to rural Dibao program in early life increases the cognitive test score at ages 10–15 by 0.038 standard deviations. Moreover, these effects are more pronounced for disadvantaged children. The Dibao program exposure also results in improvements in maternal mental health and increases in food expenditure which I interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings.