Behind the scenes: Chelsea Eats
This post summarizes a panel discussion from J-PAL Global and J-PAL North America’s 2024 Evaluating Social Programs (ESP) course. ESP is a weeklong course that trains policymakers and practitioners on conducting randomized program evaluations.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its profound economic consequences, public and private leaders in Chelsea, Massachusetts created Chelsea Eats. This unconditional cash transfer program provided over 2,000 Chelsea residents with US$200–US$400 per month (depending on household size) for nine months. Program administrators used a lottery to select recipients, enabling researchers to run a randomized evaluation assessing the impact of the cash transfers. In this piece, J-PAL affiliated researcher Jeffrey Liebman (Harvard) and former City Manager of Chelsea, Thomas Ambrosino, discuss the motivation, design, and evaluation of Chelsea Eats.
Can you begin by setting the scene for the program and evaluation we’re discussing today?
Tom: Chelsea is a small, working class city north of Boston. Many of its residents work in the service industry and were considered essential workers, unable to stay home during the shut-downs of the early pandemic. So Covid-19 exposure was a big concern and rates were very high. Unemployment hit our community hard as well. Moreover, many residents were not able to access the expanded unemployment benefits or stimulus checks at the time due to immigration status.
Chelsea also has a very strong sense of community and collective responsibility. When fears of widespread food insecurity set in, community leaders quickly developed a grassroots food distribution program at an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately the need was even greater than initially assessed and it became unsustainable and inefficient to distribute food this way. We therefore decided to pivot to providing cash assistance for recipients to purchase their own groceries, or whatever else they deemed necessary.
How did you decide you wanted to not only run the program, but also evaluate it? Why was the evaluation component important to you, your constituents, and other stakeholders?
Tom: To start, there were requirements from some of the program’s funders to be able to demonstrate the impact of their investment. Also, a number of stakeholders were a bit skeptical about how the money would be spent, so we needed to track spending behaviors. But more than that, it was important for us to know whether what we were doing was making a difference.
Can you share more about your partnership and the timeline for this project?
Tom: This project got off the ground very quickly. By the time we brought on Jeff, we were planning to launch in about three weeks. So logistically speaking, we were seeking a research partner who could actually support this project in such a short period of time. But more importantly than that, I wanted to make sure we were partnering with a compassionate and empathetic team who could treat people who experienced trauma from the Covid-19 pandemic with dignity. Spending time with Jeff, it was clear to me that he and his team understood they were dealing with a delicate situation, and they did so with care.
Jeff: Usually we do prefer a bit longer of a runway when setting up research partnerships, but when we heard about this opportunity we knew we needed to do it. The Chelsea team was already committed to holding a lottery for allocating the cash assistance, so that provided an ideal opportunity for a randomized evaluation. Another thing that made Chelsea such a great collaboration was that there was a strong relationship and a lot of trust between the community and city officials. Finally, as Tom mentioned, there was a firm commitment to understanding the impact of the program. They hoped it worked but were open to learning from evaluation results either way. That’s key in a research partnership.
Can you speak a bit more about the design of the evaluation? How did the randomized design and surveying work?
Tom: Individuals and families were eligible to enter our lottery if they lived in Chelsea and had a household income below 30 percent of the area median income. People who were in greater need or in a higher risk situation (e.g., caretakers, people with disabilities, and those ineligible for other food assistance programs) were given additional lottery tickets. We also thought a lottery was a fair way to allocate the funds, since we unfortunately knew we couldn’t provide the money to everyone. Over 3,600 people applied for a Chelsea Eats cash assistance card and 2,213 won the lottery and received the cards.
Jeff: As mentioned, the lottery made doing the randomized evaluation pretty straightforward. That said, we did have a lot of work to do around deciding what outcomes to measure and how. The inherent flexibility of cash transfers means that they can impact a wide range of outcomes. Our main focus was the direct impacts of the cash on food satisfaction, food security, diet quality, and financial distress. We also looked at some downstream effects on health and school attendance. And finally, because these are the questions policymakers tend to ask about cash transfers, we looked at employment and how people spent the funds.
We used administrative data to assess spending patterns, school attendance, and health care utilization. The other outcomes were primarily measured using surveys. We did six surveys over the course of the study, offered in English and Spanish, and respondents could choose between answering online or over the phone. We found that surveying folks regularly was helpful in building trust and achieving high response rates.
And what were the evaluation results?
Tom: While the program was running, it was really helpful for me to receive data from Jeff’s team. We were able to see that people were spending money on food as we intended, and we could see money was going into Chelsea businesses, which helped the program gain more support from some of the initially skeptical stakeholders. This helped us extend the program from six months to nine months.
Jeff: The cash transfer succeeded in accomplishing the things the city designed the program for: people spent more money on food, they were happier with the food they were consuming, and they increased their intake of total calories, fruit, vegetables, and unprocessed meat. Cash transfer recipients also had lower levels of financial distress. There was no impact on school attendance.
In our surveys, we did not find an impact on physical or mental health. However, when we linked to administrative medical records, we did find impacts on various health outcomes. Those who received the cash transfer had fewer emergency department visits, including those related to behavioral health or substance use, fewer admissions to the hospital from the emergency department, and more outpatient visits to subspecialists than those who did not receive the cash transfer.
How did you share these results back with the community, and how have they been used?
Jeff: We shared the results with the community through a few channels. For example, we presented at a community poster session at Chelsea High School where Chelsea students and researchers like us shared studies happening in the Chelsea community. We regularly briefed city officials about what we were finding. The Boston Globe also reported on our results. I also brought insights from how Chelsea implemented their cash transfer program to other cities that were asking my Government Performance Lab for advice on setting up their own basic income programs.
Tom: It was really helpful to have these results to show the community and City Council that the program was successful and this was money well-spent. This helped us run a second wave of the program in 2023.
For more on Chelsea Eats, watch the J-PAL video for an overview of the study results and visit this page for more details.
Authored By
Thomas Ambrosino
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many residents of Chelsea, Massachusetts—a majority Latino/a and immigrant community—faced food insecurity and economic hardship. The City of Chelsea implemented a cash transfer program called Chelsea Eats, which provided eligible households with up to US$400 per month for nine months. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation on the impact of the unconditional cash transfer on health care utilization and a variety of health outcomes. Those who received the cash transfer had fewer emergency department visits, including those related to behavioral health or substance use, fewer admissions to the hospital from the emergency department, and more outpatient visits to subspecialists than those who did not receive the cash transfer. There were no significant differences in visits to primary care, Covid-19 vaccination, or biomarker measures of health.
Problema de política pública
In the United States, people with low incomes experience worse health than their higher income counterparts. Immigrant communities can face additional disparities in employment, income, and access to social safety net programming.12 The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent employment and income shocks exacerbated these disparities.3 Many social safety net programs that helped buffer people from food and financial insecurity during the pandemic—including unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—were unavailable to undocumented immigrants due to eligibility restrictions.
Income support through cash transfers may improve health outcomes and reduce financial strain, particularly among populations that do not have access to the full set of social safety net resources. A common claim about cash transfers, especially unconditional ones, is that they can increase substance use, thereby decreasing health outcomes. Previous studies of other populations in the United States have found mixed results on the impact cash transfers have on health outcomes. Can unconditional cash transfers improve health outcomes for a low-income, majority Latino/a and immigrant population?
Contexto de la evaluación
The City of Chelsea was disproportionately affected by Covid-19; by the end of 2020, the city had the highest cumulative incidence rate in Massachusetts. The city’s workforce was also concentrated in sectors that were shut down due to the pandemic (e.g., service industries and factories),4 and many in the community’s large immigrant population were not eligible for unemployment insurance or stimulus checks.
To address the growing rates of food insecurity in Chelsea, the city ran a financial support program for residents called Chelsea Eats. The program distributed debit cards with up to US$400 dollars given each month to eligible individuals via a lottery. The cash amount depended on an individual’s household size: a household of one, two, or more than three people would receive US$200, US$300, or US$400 respectively. Residents were eligible to apply for the program if they resided in Chelsea and their family income was below thirty percent of the Boston area median income. The cards could be used anywhere that accepted Visa. The program ran from November 2020 to July 2021.
Detalles de la intervención
Because applications outnumbered the capacity of the program, the program used a lottery to randomly select who would receive the funds. Only one person per family was permitted to enter the lottery, but they could receive additional lottery tickets if they met specific criteria: they had a child, they had an older adult in the family, they were a veteran or disabled, no one was working in the family, they were ineligible for food assistance programs, or they were not receiving unemployment benefits. Via lottery among 2,880 applicants, 1,746 were selected to receive the cash transfer. The 1,134 who were not selected formed the comparison group.
The primary outcome of the study was emergency department visits. As secondary outcomes, researchers investigated four types of emergency department visits. These included: 1) emergency department visits resulting in hospital admission, 2) visits related to behavioral health (including mental health and substance use disorders), 3) visits related to substance use disorders, and 4) visits that were avoidable (i.e., pertaining a health concern that could have been treated outside of the emergency department setting). Researchers included outpatient visits, Covid-19 vaccinations, and biomarkers such as blood pressure, body weight, hemoglobin, and cholesterol as additional outcome variables. The study used health record data from three major health systems to measure these outcomes.
Resultados y lecciones de la política pública
After the nine-month study period, results showed that those who received the cash transfer made significantly fewer emergency department visits overall relative to the comparison group. Those who received the cash transfer made fewer emergency department visits that led to a hospital admission and fewer visits related to behavioral health or substance use. There were no significant differences in total outpatient visits nor in other health outcomes measured, however outpatient visits to subspecialists were higher among those who received the cash transfer compared to those that did not.
Emergency department visits
Those who received the cash transfer had 217.1 emergency department (ED) visits per 1,000 people while the comparison group had 317.5 visits per 1,000 people, or an adjusted difference of 87.0 fewer visits per 1,000 people (a relative decrease of 27 percent). The cash transfer group had 21.6 fewer ED visits related to behavioral health (a 62 percent decrease), 12.8 fewer visits related to substance use (an 87 percent decrease), and 27.3 fewer visits that resulted in hospital admission (a 42 percent decrease). There was no statistically significant impact on potentially avoidable emergency department visits.
Outpatient use
The cash transfer did not significantly impact the total number of outpatient visits. However, there was an increase of 303.1 subspeciality visits per 1,000 persons for the cash transfer group (a 21 percent increase from a baseline of 1,424.8 subspeciality visits for the comparison group). This effect was larger for those without a car and for visits to clinics further from Chelsea.
Other health outcomes
There was no significant impact on Covid-19 vaccination rates, nor the measured biomarkers of blood pressure, body weight, hemoglobin, and cholesterol.
Overall, the reduction in emergency department visits for those who received the cash transfer may indicate that policies that provide income support can have important benefits for health in the United States. In addition, the study found fewer emergency department visits related to substance use in the cash transfer group, contradicting prior studies and common beliefs that cash transfers will increase substance use and raise alcohol- or substance-related morbidity and mortality. Although the cash transfer did not change utilization of primary care or Covid-19 vaccination rates, which were readily accessible in Chelsea, it increased use of outpatient subspecialty care; the cash transfer may have helped pay for the indirect and direct costs associated with accessing this less accessible form of care. By decreasing the demand for more expensive acute care relative to outpatient care, cash benefits also have the potential to be cost saving to the health care system.
Use of results:
While the need for this particular intervention in Chelsea dissipated once the economy recovered from the Covid-19 shutdowns, its perceived success led Chelsea to run another cash transfer program providing three months of benefits to 2000 residents starting in January 2023 with the aim of assisting low-income residents with energy costs during winter months.
Chang, Cindy D. 2019. “Social Determinants of Health and Health Disparities Among Immigrants and Their Children.” Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care 49 (1): 23–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cppeds.2018.11.009.
Sharareh, Nasser, Hilary K. Seligman, Taiwo P. Adesoba, Andrea S. Wallace, Rachel Hess, and Fernando A. Wilson. 2023. “Food Insecurity Disparities Among Immigrants in the U.S.” AJPM Focus 2 (3): 100113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.focus.2023.100113.
Borjas, George J., and Hugh Cassidy. 2020. “The Adverse Effect of the COVID-19 Labor Market Shock on Immigrant Employment.” Working Paper. Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27243.
Twin Seas Media, dir. 2022. Raising the Floor Official Trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUAVDOQ_KiE.
The Baby’s First Years evaluation is a J-PAL-supported study evaluating the impact of poverty alleviation on child development and families. Two researchers involved in Baby’s First Years discuss the importance of centering parents and their experiences to better understand the impact cash payments have on families.
The Baby’s First Years evaluation is a J-PAL-supported study evaluating the impact of poverty alleviation on child development and families. In this post, Lisa Gennetian (Duke University) and Sarah Halpern-Meekin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), two researchers involved in Baby’s First Years, discuss the importance of centering parents and their experiences to better understand the impact cash payments have on families.
Nearly all parents want to be good parents; they want their children to have good childhoods, and they want their children to be happy. Regardless of income, wealth, or stress associated with work and poverty, parents will talk about their children with pride, joy, compassion, and a desire to protect them. Parenting is a fundamentally emotional and relational role. However, prevailing theories of parenting and child development generally focus on time and attention but don’t account for the vast and complex role of emotions and experiences. This omission presents dilemmas for guiding analyses of parenting in evaluating interventions. Expanding our understanding of parenting and development by considering these emotions can potentially strengthen the validity and relevance of results of randomized evaluations.
As researchers involved in a randomized evaluation of an unconditional cash transfer to mothers and families residing in or near poverty with young children in the United States, we are paying particular attention to how leading theories help and hinder us from fully assessing the impact of cash transfers to families.
Prevailing parenting theories and their limitations in practice
In the economics literature, theories relevant to parenting include both altruism (care about the child and the child’s future “utility”) and paternalism (parents doing for the child what they see as good for the child). These, in turn, shape the types and quality of the inputs (what economists call the technology or production function) that influences parental investment of financial and time resources in children. Such an approach offers conceptual guidance on how parental resource allocations can affect children’s “human capital”—skills related to education and job preparation.
In the child development literature, theories of parenting center on quality of interactions, including the responsiveness of parents to children’s cues, and certain styles of parenting. Here, emotions may be implicit in affecting interactions and parenting styles (e.g., authoritarian parenting may intersect with being angry or less emotive).
But what if time spent reading a favorite book together at bedtime, for example, was as impactful as a weekly outing to a coffeeshop to get a cake pop, or taking a stroll to the park? Economic theories attune us to the first activity as an investment in children’s human capital. However, they are largely agnostic (or potentially dismissive) as to the “meaning” of the cake pops or the visits to the park as their own independent influence on children’s wellbeing. Existing tools assessing child development attune us to the “conversational turns” between parent and child during these activities and to the presence of an “engaged parenting style” as capturing quality while reading together. But the role of laughter, shared positive experiences and emotions, and the creation of meaningful family rituals and memories from the coffee shop and the park are only interpreted indirectly or implicitly.
These prevailing theoretical perspectives may be limited in offering a robust picture of family life; they also do not map on to what we directly hear from parents.
Expanding beyond these theories
Recently, a mother we interviewed described using some of her cash gift for the month to get holiday decorations. She showed us a photo of her girls, four and nine, each decorating half of the front door. We heard mom’s warm memories and felt her kids’ excitement, as she described how the photo showed “all their personalities that were going on right there; because it was like, ‘This is my side, and this is your side.’ … They are just adorably cute! … They’re good at sharing, but I try to get them, like I try to get them more working together.” This mom had the family put up holiday trimmings little by little across December, boosting her kids’ anticipation and joy as they decorated their way toward Christmas. And it’s not just for her kids, she said, “I’m excited. … God has been good. … I’m just able to see them be happy.” Many of these holiday extras, she explained, she was able to buy with her monthly cash gift.
If we only focus on human capital investments or parent-child interactions, the importance of these positive emotions and this annual family ritual, of the ways that this mom scaffolds her daughters’ relationship with each other by encouraging them to cooperate on projects together, could get missed in direct measurements during planned data collection moments. This might preclude uncovering certain types of effects on parents and children or shape interpretation of findings in limiting ways.
Addressing these blindspots matters for a variety of reasons:
Emotions affect or interact with investments.
Parenting is associated with experiencing a wider range of emotions and more intense positive emotions than when parents are away from their children. And so, parents may be motivated to spend on their children because it makes them feel good. Parenting is an emotional and relational activity, and how we feel about our performance of that role can strike at the heart of how we feel about ourselves. Research has shown that parents with limited incomes feel a strong need not just to cover the basics financially, but also to be able to purchase “extras” for their children. Without more guiding theory, such motivations—outside of the bounds of parental beliefs and knowledge—end up being noise in economic models.
Not all parental investments may fit into conventional mechanisms that have returns to “human capital” development.
News accounts and qualitative interviews with people receiving the expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit attested to the important changes in family life resulting from the additional income. This included, for example, parents with lower incomes being able to enroll their children in extracurricular activities or having more family outings. Unless family outings are categorized as “time spent in enriching activities,” theories of family investment in economics have little to say about the full emotional and relational return to time spent together on family outings. A trip to the movie theater, going to the mall, or even going out of town to visit family can be quantified in dollars and minutes, but their meaning may elevate or dilute those quantifiable metrics.
Emotions affect motivation and decision-making, which can affect investments and parenting behavior.
There are also suggestions in existing research that positive emotions in parents in the short-term may give rise to enhanced cognitive processing, like problem solving, over the longer term.
Applying new, expansive theories to rigorous evaluation
The hypotheses we as researchers develop as we evaluate the wide array of cash transfers families experience—from government sources, like the Child Tax Credit or the Alaska Permanent Fund, as well as from philanthropic sources, like the various unconditional cash gift experiments underway across the country, including our own Baby’s First Years study—must be informed by a broad set of theories. These theories should attend not just to the financial and time investments parents make in their children, but also to the emotional and relational experiences of parenting and family life.
With such an approach, we can better anticipate and understand the trade-offs and decisions parents make about how to spend their money and time. We can also make more informed choices about the outcomes and metrics by which we assess policy or intervention success. Parents care about bedtime stories and cake pops and park visits, and they spend accordingly. Yet, our current research approaches are not designed to capture these “preferences” or “interactions” beyond what is observable or measurable with our current tool set of validated outcomes.
Here are some examples of how to do this:
Go beyond child-specific time to whole-family time.
Current measurement often captures child-related expenditures (clothing, books, toys, enrichment activities) or minutes parents spent on child development activities (e.g., reading together, telling stories). Additional measures could capture family-related experiences and activities (such as the trips to the coffee shop and the park, or a family decorating for the holidays); and, including siblings and whole-family interactions.
Broadly consider types of spending, time, and experiences that may intersect with the design, magnitude, and predictability of cash transfers.
For example, does the periodic versus lump sum form of cash transfers alter the proportion of dollars parents spend on child-related core expenditures, treats (like a take-out meal), or family-related experiences? Do they vary in how they support the quality of children’s home environments or parents’ purchases of childcare, core household expenses, and big-ticket items, like air conditioners or washing machines?
Model how time and money allocations that evoke positive emotions affect short- versus long-term outcomes.
Also, how might these predict outcomes for children and parents during children’s younger years versus their adolescent years?
Measure a wide variety of emotions.
Ameliorating negative outcomes (e.g., avoiding food insecurity or eviction) is important but distinct from promoting positive outcomes (e.g., a child feeling a sense of loving connection with a parent). It is likely possible for an intervention to do one without the other, therefore assessing both are essential to fully evaluating intervention impacts.
Pursuing these insights has important implications for evaluating and measuring the impacts of ongoing and future randomized evaluations of cash transfer programs and policies.
J-PAL affiliated researcher Paul Niehaus (UC San Diego) shares his perspective on studies of cash transfers in low- and middle-income countries and on how the United States can learn from other contexts.
Cash transfer interventions—cash payments that can be one-time or recurring, conditional or unconditional, and direct or indirect—are gaining more attention worldwide. In September 2023, researchers conducting randomized evaluations of cash transfer programs in the United States gathered at Duke University to discuss their ongoing and completed research projects. J-PAL affiliate Paul Niehaus (UC San Diego) kicked off the conference with a keynote speech highlighting his work with GiveDirectly and research on cash transfers conducted in low- and middle-income countries. In this post, he shares his perspective on these studies and on how the United States can learn from other contexts.
You kicked off this convening with a keynote address about cash transfers in low- and middle-income contexts. Can you share what rigorous research on these programs has taught us so far?
There’s been an enormous amount—300 or so high-quality studies according to the 3ie Evidence Portal—so there is no quick synthesis. But in the talk, I emphasized what we’ve learned in low and middle income contexts on three broad questions that people often have about cash transfers.
- What have recipients done with the money? Across a wide range of contexts, across many studies, we see people spending money sensibly on things that improve their lives, often on things that matter for both the future (e.g., assets, education) and the the present (e.g.,. We haven’t seen evidence of much money being spent on things that could be self-harmful (e.g., alcohol, tobacco), which many policymakers are worried about. None of this proves that these are the “best” possible uses of money, but the overall picture has been positive.
- What do recipients do differently with their time? This question centers in particular on how much people work. There are some tensions there: funders often worry that recipients will work less (which they would view as a problem), while economists tend to take the view that leisure is a good thing. In any case, the pattern has been that,if anything, recipients typically work a bit more and/or shift some hours out of wage employment and into self-employment.
- How has all of this affected more subjective measures of well-being? Here we’ve seen reductions in many, though not all, studies on standard measures of depression or anxiety. I don’t think these are the end-all for measurement—speaking for myself, I’ve certainly felt more anxious after getting some big grants and that doesn’t mean it was a bad thing. There are also some results I find really striking. For example, some studies show reductions in the suicide rate due to transfers, capturing the effects of cash on extreme distress in a very poignant way.
You suggested three “more interesting” questions at the end of your presentation. Could you share what those are and why you think they’re important?
The questions above are common ones and totally understandable, but not actually the ones I would ask first as a policymaker trying to figure out how much of my budget to allocate to cash transfers and how to structure them.
First, I’d focus more attention on who benefits the most from cash. Part of this question is whether we can get better—and faster—at figuring out which households to give money to, and how much to give. Households themselves don’t always allocate resources equally, and it’s hard to measure who gets what within them. It would be useful to know how much individual people are impacted when their household gets a transfer, and whether we can target transfers based on those impacts.
Second is whether transfers are structured in ways that work well for the financial lives of people living in or near extreme poverty. Managing cash flow can be very tricky because their incomes and expenses tend to be volatile and the financial tools and services available to them are generally inadequate. So we want to structure transfers in ways that help. People often have a hard time saving up large lump sums, for example, so it could be valuable to build that option into public programs rather than requiring that everyone get small monthly payments.
Third is how transfers affect the people who don’t get them. We can be fairly sure there will be some indirect effects, if only because people who get money use it to transact, and that affects others involved in those transactions. Most of the evidence comes from evaluations that are too small to see these kinds of effects. There are a few notable exceptions: in one project I contributed to, we estimated that the local economy grew by US$2.5 for every US$1 transferred in. These effects are harder to value—it’s not as simple as saying “you got $1, which is worth $1,”—but are worth prioritizing.
After your keynote, you received a handful of questions about the place of governments and philanthropy in funding and administering cash transfers. Can you talk a bit about what roles you see for these and other stakeholders?
The usual maxim that philanthropy can afford to take risks that government or other public actors cannot certainly applies here. To take an example, a lot of people think that cash transfers won’t work well in more remote areas where people live further from markets. To test this theory, GiveDirectly (which I co-founded) identified several remote communities, gave people money, and evaluated the impacts. There’s value in testing conventional wisdom by trying things that people presume will not work.
That said, we sometimes overthink our philanthropy. My view is that simply giving money to low-income people and letting them decide how to use it is a great opportunity. It doesn’t always need to fit into a grand strategy for leveraging or influencing how other people deploy their money.
What advice would you give to researchers looking to study this topic?
The core advice I’d give is to try to get to conceptual clarity on what questions we want to answer and why. And to recognize that in doing that you’re unavoidably taking an ethical stance, which is something researchers often don’t like to own up to.
We live in this golden age of causal inference where we’ve become much better at measuring the effect of X on Y. There’s a lot to celebrate in that. But it doesn’t mean that it’s important that we measure the effect of every X on every Y. Cash transfers are a case in point because by definition they’re very flexible and so they tend to have some effect on pretty much everything. We could go on endlessly trying to estimate all those effects, trying to figure out why they are different in different contexts, how to deal with the fact that no one study is ever going to measure all the impacts that actually happened, and then trying to figure out how to communicate about all of that.
To me that misses the point. The main purpose of giving someone $1 is for them to have $1. Going after questions like, “are cash transfers a cost-effective way to improve food security,” say, can be problematic because the objective is narrow. I don’t think the ratio of food security to spending is an acceptable criterion for ethical decision-making. Ethically good decisions are going to depend on answers to some other questions like the ones above—what are the externalities, the effects on non-recipients, for example. So I try to focus on those.
In an accompanying post, Lisa Gennetian and J-PAL staff share key takeaways and reflections from researchers in the United States evaluating cash transfer programs.