Eva Vivalt

At long last, the first working papers have been released for a project I’ve been working on since 2016: an evaluation of a program that provided $1000/month unconditionally for 3 years to 1000 low-income individuals, while another 2000 received $50/month as the control group.

The papers:

• The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States
• Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Guaranteed Income

In time, I’ll say a lot more about what we found, but for now I just want to recognize what an immense team effort it has been. It’s been an incredible experience working with Alex Bartik, David Broockman, Patrick Krause, Sarah Miller, and Elizabeth Rhodes. But also, so, so many people have contributed to this project in one way or another.

It also wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that OpenResearch really enabled a different kind of project than is typical in economics. Massive amounts of thought went into this, from a lengthy piloting phase to Elizabeth Rhodes tracking down participants and designing a font that looked like her handwriting so she could add personalized notes to postcards sent to keep people engaged. All the details were thought of, all the bases covered, all the grants were applied to, and all the outcomes collected. Partners helped to pass a law in Illinois to ensure participants would not lose important benefits. A custom mobile app was developed. We were even able to collect biomarkers at endline to investigate potential health effects, a massive logistical effort.

It’s been a real pleasure working with this team. Some first papers are linked above, but expect more coming soon.

Recently, there’s been a surge of interest in and attention on work on the evidence-to-policy pipeline. Calling it a “pipeline” perhaps implies something too direct: the path by which evidence can affect policy is often circuitous and hard to pin down.

Nonetheless, I thought it might be a good time to share a round-up of related media links, based on work with Aidan Coville and Sampada KC.

First, at VoxDev, I summarize results from two sets of experiments run at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. This talk focuses more on what we learned about how policymakers interpret different kinds of evidence, i.e., what were the takeaways?

The next link, from a lecture given as part of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) College and University Fund Lecture Series, also highlights what we learned, but with more emphasis on how we learned it. It goes more in-depth on the experiments and draws some broader conclusions.

There remains plenty of fertile ground for further research in this area, and I’d encourage interested grad students or faculty to pursue it. Given the importance of the decisions policymakers make, small improvements in decision-making quality could potentially have large impacts.

I have some very good news to share. As many of you know, back in 2012 I set up AidGrade, a small non-profit research institute, to collect the results of impact evaluations and synthesize them.

Fast-forward 11 years. A global consortium of institutions, led by the World Bank, is going to be working on an open repository of impact evaluation results that could be used for meta-analysis and policy (the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library, or IDEAL). This is really close to AidGrade’s mission, and we will be participating in the consortium, helping to design the protocols, contribute data, and perform cross-checks with the other groups.

Apart from being generally excited about this soon-to-exist global public good, I am thrilled with the impact AidGrade has had. We made a case that this was a thing that should exist, and over time enough other people agreed that it will soon be a much larger thing (in which AidGrade will play the smallest of roles). All along, I was hoping that there could be a better institutional home for such a repository, and here we are. It’s the best possible outcome.

To anyone who supported AidGrade, either through time or money over the years, I hope you feel pleased with what you helped accomplish with AidGrade, and I hope you are as excited as I am about IDEAL.