IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33209.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Household Responses to Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Compton, California

Author

Listed:
  • Sidhya Balakrishnan
  • Sewin Chan
  • Sara Constantino
  • Johannes Haushofer
  • Jonathan Morduch

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Sidhya Balakrishnan & Sewin Chan & Sara Constantino & Johannes Haushofer & Jonathan Morduch, 2024. "Household Responses to Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Compton, California," NBER Working Papers 33209, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33209
    Note: LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33209.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33209. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.