Thread by @Afinetheorem

Massive OpenResearch basic income papers are out (@smilleralert @dbroockman @evavivalt @AlexBartik @elizabethrds). Very much worth reading - my view is that it is an incredible RCT and an incredible disappointment. RCT was USD11400/yr for 3 years, 1k treatment, 2k control. 1/x

The study was crazy, by the way. Very low attrition, time diaries, *blood draws to measure health*(?!) My favorite: they got Ilinois to pass a law that this RCT income wasn't taxable & didn't change other-benefit eligibility. That is, it was a net post-tax increase in income! 2/x

Disappointment 1: Even though these are low-income people (avg household income 30k, so RCT is almost 40% increase in income!), treatment work hours fell 5% relative to control, and treatment household income only 6200, not 11600 higher than control. 3/x

(Depending on what controls you want to use, whether you use third year incomes vs full sample outcomes, how you think about measurement of household income, 22-47% of UBI transfer reversed by less HH income. That's a ton!) 4/x

(Btw, overall income rise is post-covid inflation & employment recovery, but also sample selected on low-income and we know this is temp state for many. So not a big surprise to see average incomes for all much higher 3 years on. Importance of a good control in this setting!) 5/x

What about other endpoints? Better job? No - and can rule out even small effects on job quality. More human capital training? No. Better *health*? No. And that's even though experts the team surveyed thought there would be huge positive benefits! 6/x

You have to squint to find *any* positive effects other than "people do more leisure when you give $". Treatment groups say they are more likely to consider entrepreneurship in the future. Some young folks in treatment report more education (though this doesn't survive MHT). 7/x

This is *by far* the largest, low-income, developed country universal basic income trial, and by far the most rigorous. My posterior on how valuable UBI is compared to, say, expanded EITC and spending on early childhood has gone *way* down. 8/x

A caveat is that broader UBI both has more deleterious negative consequence for labor (the $ have to come from other tax revenue) and more positive gen eq. spending multipliers driving labor demand (e.g., Jones and Marinescu ) 9/xhome.uchicago.edu/~j1s/Jones_Ala…

Papers can be found here: I actually recommend reading the linked NBER papers and not the "summaries", which I think are wildly too optimistic in their framing compared to what the research actually found. 10/10openresearchlab.org/findings

Final note: massive up to authors & funders. 50 million $ and years of hard work on a topic authors care deeply about, & instead of p hacking or pretending things went well, they were rigorous & honest about null results. Journalists: this is very rare and should be highlighted!

Final final thought: to get an idea of how long this paper has been in progress, I found an email exchange w/ one of the authors & me about the entrepreneurship section from almost 8 years ago! YC was funding this back in the Sam days. Good research is hard and takes time. Kudos!