It's well known that lower income people tend to suffer much worse health. Is poverty at the heart of this disparity, and, if so, could a large cash transfer help close this gap? We examine an RCT that provided 1000 low income participants $1000/month for 3 years. We find… The cash generated big improvements in stress and mental health, but they were short-lived. By the second year of the transfer, treatment and control reported similar rates of stress and mental health, and we can rule out even small improvements.

Results from the OpenResearch RCT are out: 1000 low income participants randomly assigned to receive $1000/mo for 3 years. I’ll do a thread on some specific results shortly, but I just want to say how proud I am to be part of this study and highlight what we’ve accomplished (1/n) It’s weirdly hard to give people money—some people don’t have bank accounts. Accounts close. People change names, move, get married, go to jail. Just logistically getting this to work was a challenge.

Mortality increases during COVID varied in important ways across individual based on their occupation, income, insurance status and residence. But variation in mortality *within* these groups by race/ethnicity is just massively bigger. E.g.: Blacks in the *highest income* category experienced mortality increases 3.6x larger than the *poorest* whites. New paper uses data from the ACS linked to longitudinal mortality records from the SSA through Q2 2020, with @LaurawherryR @BhashMazumder healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.13…