Cash transfers – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

This cash experiment cut child deaths in half. Here’s the catch.

It sometimes seems like the basic income wars will never go away. My first Vox piece on the idea of a government-provided guaranteed income came in the summer of 2014 — a simpler time, the Obama years. I wrote a big feature about it in 2017. Since then, we’ve had Andrew Yang’s presidential run, Covid-era stimulus checks, and massive progress in AI, all of which have made the idea feel more plausible. We’ve also had some research findings that throw cold water on the concept, at least in the US. Three studies that gave out unrestricted cash to Americans during the pandemic found nulls on all the outcomes they tested: the cash didn’t improve health or self-reported well-being or even, in one study, how well people say they’re doing financially. ….[READ]