Projects
Recent working papers
Household Responses to Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Compton, California (with Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, Sara Constantino, and Johannes Haushofer). We study the effects of a two-year unconditional cash transfer program for lowincome households in Compton, California between 2021 and 2023. 695 households were randomly assigned to receive transfers averaging about $500 per month over a two year period, with 1,402 households randomly assigned to a control group. To measure the impact of transfer frequency, half of the recipients were paid twice per month and the other half received quarterly transfers. We surveyed 1,074 respondents 18 months after the beginning of transfers. Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers (at baseline) had lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points. Income (excluding the transfer) was reduced by $333 per month on average relative to control households, and expenditures were reduced by $302 per month. At the same time, average non-housing debt balances declined by $2,190 over 18 months relative to the control group, although the drop is not statistically significant. We find a significant improvement in housing security, but no overall effects on indices of psychological and financial well-being. The recipients of twice-monthly transfers were more likely to own a car, had lower credit card debt and greater food security than recipients of quarterly transfers, but otherwise transfer frequency had little impact. Compared to male recipients, female recipients reported a greater increase in financial security, and a smaller reduction in earned income and expenditures.
Poverty at Higher Frequency (with Joshua Merfeld). National poverty rates are meant to track the share of populations that are poor in a given year. We show that, instead, de facto poverty rates often reflect the fraction of the year that households experience poverty. This transformation arises in low- and middle-income countries that follow expert guidelines for collecting household expenditure data. The de facto measures reflect seasonal variability and register deprivations of households not usually considered poor. With panel data from India we show how, contrary to historical definitions, global poverty depends on households’ abilities to smooth consumption within the year.
Ideas for India: India’s Poverty Rate Does Not Measure What You Think It Does
Selecting Experimental Sites for External Validity (with Michael Gechter, Keisuke Hirano, Jean Lee, Mahreen Mahmud, Orville Mondal, Saravana Ravindran, and Abu Shonchoy). Policy decisions often depend on evidence generated elsewhere. We take a decision theoretic approach to choosing where to experiment to optimize external validity. We frame external validity through a policy lens, taking a Bayesian approach and developing a prior specification for the joint distribution of site-level treatment effects using a microeconometric structural model and allowing for other sources of heterogeneity. With data from South Asia, we show that, relative to basing policies on experiments in optimal sites, large efficiency losses result from instead using evidence from randomly-selected sites or, conversely, from sites with the largest expected treatment effects.