Sarah Miller

I said this in the other site but I count 3 of the authors quoted in that NYT article, and their paper was released as an NBER WP so not exactly hidden. Quite unfair in my opinion for the journalist to put the blame on the researchers and not on the media!

Haha all good just thought it was funny 😄

the public loves us 🥰

🚨 New NBER working paper: "The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Parenting and Children"

This paper estimates the effects of receiving a $1,000/month guaranteed income for 3 years, compared to a control group receiving $50/month, on children and parents in the US. 1/

Thanks Nathan!

More in the paper! @alexbartik.bsky.social @evavivalt.bsky.social @elizabethrds.bsky.social @dbroockman.bsky.social

The transfer doesn’t seem to have affected births in either linked admin records or in our survey measures. So much for kids being “normal”!

Linking to admin records on college going for the kids, the point estimates suggest positive effects but most of the kids are just too young for this to be conclusive. We’ll just have to wait..

Statewide standardized math test scores may have somewhat worsened for the treated kids, although the effect is not significant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing and we see no similar effect for English.

We linked kids to administrative records from schools. We don’t find much of a change in these outcomes like attendance or repeating a grade.

We don’t find changes in many other outcomes we might have thought would have improved—like the home or neighborhood environment, children’s food security, or parental satisfaction.

But! Parents in the treatment group also reported that their kids had more stress and developmental difficulties. Possibly because they were monitoring them more closely and picked up on problems they might not have noticed.

Parents also spent more $ on their kids, especially those with low baseline incomes. Among these parents, the use of and quality of non-parental care (like daycare) also increased.

Treated parents reported better parenting behaviors, with the biggest improvements among the parents with the lowest baseline incomes; monitoring and supervision improved and reports of using corporal punishment fell.

Abstract for NBER WP 34040, “The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Parenting and Children”

1000 low income adults were randomly selected to receive $1000/month for 3 years, with a control group receiving $50/month over that same period. Many of them had children in the household. How did it affect how they parented and their kids’ outcomes? www.nber.org/papers/w34040

Alt text: Featured Event: Understanding the Impacts of Cash Transfers on Health Outcomes | March 18, 2025 | 3:30-5:00pm ET | Live over Zoom. Left hand side: Photo of a woman holding a credit card and phone while smiling.

1/4 🗓️Save the date!
On March 18, from 3:30-5pm ET we are hosting a webinar featuring 3 #RCTs that evaluated the impact of cash transfers on health. Read this 🧵 to learn more about the research and register for the event (www.povertyactionlab.org/event/unders...

What can you say, really? Just an endless series of disgraceful lows.

I’m sorry to hear this. Unfortunately this is not the first example I’ve heard of…

We recently added several analyses to our paper on the employment effects of a $1000/month guaranteed income. 🚨

These new analyses include, for the first time, administrative data on income and employment and results for marriage/ divorce and benefits, among other outcomes.

Read on for results! 1/

Amazing work—congratulations! Wow!!

Inference with a single treated cluster www.restud.com/inference-wi...

Woah congrats!

Is there a more millennial Christmas album? Merry Christmas!

Wow, huge get!! Massive! Congrats to Brown!

Link to paper: public.websites.umich.edu/~mille/OHIE_...

In the population we study, it doesn’t seem to reduce criminal justice involvement, which of course is the product of many complicated social, economic, and personal factors.

We know Medicaid does a lot of great things like reducing mortality and generating long term health and economic benefits among those enrolled as kids. No program can do everything for everyone.

One implication is that benefits of Medicaid on reduced criminal justice involvement may be concentrated on the highest risk groups (such as those returning from prison) where other work has found effects but we don’t have precision due to small N.

However, contrary to what we might expect, we do not find that those randomly assigned to Medicaid have lower rates of charges and convictions than those who did not receive Medicaid. Our estimates are fairly precise and can rule out most effects estimated in other settings/populations.

In 2008, Oregon allocated Medicaid eligibility to low-income adult applicants via a lottery, giving the chance to estimate the causal effect of Medicaid on outcomes. We link applicants to the lottery to admin data on criminal charges and convictions from the state of Oregon.