What would it cost to end extreme poverty? (.bib)
How much would it cost to end extreme poverty today using direct, targeted income transfers?
recent working papers
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How did so much of the world's population exit extreme poverty? (teaching slides)
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Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya (.bib)
What would be the consequences of a long-term commitment to provide everyone enough money to meet their basic needs?
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Maternal Cash Transfers for Gender Equity and Child Development: Experimental Evidence from India (.bib)
When and how do cash transfers pass through into nutritional intake and child development in low-income households?
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Linear estimation of global average treatment effects (.bib)
R&R, Econometrica.
How can we estimate the effects of policies at full scale from experiments run at moderate scale?
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Effects of a Universal Basic Income during the pandemic (.bib)
How is UBI effecting the lives of low-income communities in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic?
publications
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Structuring cash transfers: cash flow preferences, seasonality, and financial decisions in rural Kenya (.bib)
forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics.
How should cash transfers be structured to work best for the financial lives of people living in extreme poverty?
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A model of multiple hypothesis testing (.bib)
forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies.
When, how, and why should hypothesis testing be done differently depending on the number of hypotheses tested?
(See also related comment on FDA advisory for handling multiple endpoints in clinical trials.) -
Targeting impact versus deprivation (.bib)
forthcoming, American Economic Review.
Should anti-poverty programs be targeted solely to the most deprived, or also to the most impacted households?
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forthcoming, The Handbook of Social Protection
What are important open questions about cash transfers in low-income countries?
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General equilibrium effects of (improving) public employment programs (.bib)
Econometrica 91 (4), July 2023, pp. 1261-1295.
How does offering large-scale public employment affect rural markets?
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Identity verification standards in welfare programs: experimental evidence from India (.bib)
Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2023, pp. 1-46.
How does requiring stricter, biometric ID trade off errors of inclusion and exclusion?
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Managing self-confidence: theory and experimental evidence (.bib)
Management Science 68 (11), November 2022, pp. 7793-817.
Do people bias their learning behavior to protect their own self-image? (experimental instructions)
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General equilibrium effects of cash transfers: experimental evidence from Kenya (appendix; .bib)
Econometrica 90 (6), November 2022, pp. 2603-43.
How does an inflow of ~15% of GDP affect a poor rural economy?
Winner, Frisch Medal (2024) for best applied paper published in Econometrica in any of the previous four calendar years.
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Improving last-mile service delivery using phone-based monitoring (.bib)
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 13(2), April 2021, pp. 52-82.
Does simply calling people to measure service delivery outcomes improve them?
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Games and Economic Behavior 124, November 2020, pp. 239-53.
What are the roles of self-interest and other-regard in persuasion? (experimental instructions).
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Universal Basic Income in the developing world (.bib)
Annual Review of Economics 11, August 2019, pp. 959-983.
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Experimentation at scale (.bib)
Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(4), Fall 2017, pp. 103-24.
Should program evaluations in development economics be "bigger"?
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Building state capacity: evidence from biometric Smartcards in India (.bib)
American Economic Review 106(1), 2016, pp. 2895-2929.
Does investing in biometric payments infrastructure enhance state capacity and performance?
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The marginal rate of corruption in public programs (.bib)
Journal of Public Economics 104, 2013, pp. 52-64.
How should policy-makers determine the optimal size of "leaky" public programs?
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Corruption dynamics: the golden goose effect (.bib)
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5 (4), 2013, pp. 230-69.
With Sandip Sukhtankar.
Do corrupt agents respond to dynamic incentives as predicted by the Becker-Stigler theory?
Winner, Best Paper Prize (2014), AEJ: Economic Policy
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American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5 (1), 2013, pp. 206-238.
With Antonia Attanassova, Mariane Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan.
How should a social planner design targeting rules when he knows the implementing agents are corrupt?
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American Economic Review 102 (7), 2012, pp. 3516-30.
Do donors use foreign aid (ODA) to influence elections in developing countries?
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Filtered social learning (.bib)
Journal of Political Economy 119 (4), 2011, pp. 686-720.
Do decentralized exchanges of knowledge lead to efficient aggregate learning?
policy writing
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To speed scientific progress, understand how science policy works (.bib)
Nature 620, 24 August 2023, pp. 724-6.
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Developing the science of science (.bib)
Works in Progress, Issue 09, 8 December 2022
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Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2017.
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Foreign Affairs, October 2015.
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Show Them the Money: Why Giving Cash Helps Alleviate Poverty, (.bib)
Foreign Affairs, May-June 2014, pp. 117--126.
other working papers / work in progress
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A theory of good intentions (.bib)
Why isn't altruistic behavior more effective?
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Education and knowledge spillovers (.bib)
What spillover mechanism is most consistent with reduced-form models, knowledge policy, and the data?
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Maternal cash transfers.
Is a transfer to pregnant and nursing mothers an effective way to reduce child malnutrition in Jharkhand?
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Universal Basic Income.
What happens if you guarantee everyone in a community a basic income for over a decade?
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Policy evaluation by revealed preference.
What mode of public service delivery do beneficiaries choose if we let them vote with their feet?
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Social learning and consumer demand.
How do peers in a social network affect demand for new products?