Cash Transfers at Scale
Paul Niehaus
Cash transfers to people experiencing extreme poverty have become a policy tool of choice, reaching hundreds of millions of people each year. Frontier questions now center around scale, including: what do large inflows of capital do the communities and economies that receive them? And should policy-makers “go all the way” to Universal Basic Income?
In this talk I will describe results from a pair of ambitious experimental evaluations in Kenya designed to address these questions. The evaluations build on arguments collaborators and I have made for more experimental testing at large scales, and on the implementation work of the international NGO GiveDirectly which I co-founded.
Paul Niehaus is an associate professor of economics at the UC San Diego and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Global Policy & Strategy. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a junior affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), an affiliate of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and an affiliate at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA).
His research deals with program implementation in developing countries and with learning. He is also co-founder and president of the nonprofit GiveDirectly. In 2013, Foreign Policy named him one of its leading 100 "Global Thinkers."
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Peter Marchetti.
