The short-term impact of unconditional cash transfers: a replication study of a randomized controlled trial in Kenya

ABSTRACT

Haushofer and Shapiro examined the short-term impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) and the differential impacts by transfer recipient’s gender, timing (monthly versus lump sum) and magnitude, using data collected in a randomised controlled trial from 2011 to 2012 in rural Kenya. The study found the UCT to increase assets, consumption, revenue, food security, and psychological well-being indices, but to have no overall effects on health, education, or female empowerment indices. Compared to lump-sum transfers, monthly transfers improved food security but reduced asset holdings. Large transfers, when compared to small transfers, increased asset holdings and improved the psychological well-being index.

This replication study reexamined the main findings of Haushofer and Shapiro’s and reported consistent findings on the overall effects of the UCT and the differences across treatment arms. These findings are sustained in rigorous robustness checks, however, the Principal Component Analysis results suggest a need for further examination of the method of measuring food security, health and psychological well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Cash transfer
• assets
• consumption
• income
• psychological wellbeing
• health

Acknowledgments

This replication study was funded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). We are thankful to the 3ie reviewers, Dr Benjamin Wood, Dr John Creamer, Dr Eric Djimeu, and Scott Neilitz, as well as several anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments. We thank Nicholas Hein, Fang Qiu, Harlan Sayles and Morshed Alam from Department of Biostatistics at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre for their help with SAS and STATA coding. We give special thanks to the original authors, Dr Johannes Haushofer and Dr Jeremy Shapiro, for kindly sharing their codes, dataset and methodological documents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The data set is available at http://www.princeton.edu/haushofer/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) through the Replication Programme on Financial Services for the Poor [NA].

Notes on contributors

Hongmei Wang

Dr. Hongmei Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services Research and Administration at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health.  Dr. Wang’s research interests focus on socioeconomic determinants of health and economic evaluation of health care programs and medical intervention strategies. She is particularly interested in examining how individual choices, organizational schemes, and sociocultural structures collectively influence population health and health-related behaviors.