Thanks very much for sharing, very interesting work.
I was very pleased to see the pre-registration, which I think significantly improves the credibility of the results. Would you be able to help me understand some of the endpoints? I was hoping to see a straightforward 1:1 correspondence between the pre-registration and the paper but found it a bit confusing; it might be helpful to publish a table showing how to compare the two.
For example, the pre-registration lists ‘aspirations’ as one of the primary endpoints:
The main outcomes of interest are economic status (income, consumption, assets, and food security), anthropometrics (for children in the household between 2-12 years of age), time use (work, education, leisure, community involvement), risk-taking (especially, migrating and starting businesses), gender relations (especially female empowerment), aspirations and mental health.
the Anderson weighted index of (i) the average of responses to question 1a on aspirations for kids educational attainment, (ii) question 2c on level of assets the respondent wants to achieve in 10 years, and (ii) question 3b on the level of income they want to achieve after 10 years.
but I was not able to find it in the paper. Similarly the plan describes a ‘crime index’, based on responses to the village elder survey, and a ‘social integration index’, as other outcomes that will be studied, but I couldn’t find these in the paper.
As a follow-up, this recent NBER paper on people who receive unexpected cash windfalls in Sweden rejected the idea that poverty was the main causal factor behind poor people committing crimes at a higher rate; their non-significant point estimate was in fact that wealth transfers increased crime (though this could easily be noise). It would be good if we could contrast it with the GiveDirectly result, to see if the different environment (random vs predictable, Sweden vs Kenya) made a significant difference.
Thanks very much for sharing, very interesting work.
I was very pleased to see the pre-registration, which I think significantly improves the credibility of the results. Would you be able to help me understand some of the endpoints? I was hoping to see a straightforward 1:1 correspondence between the pre-registration and the paper but found it a bit confusing; it might be helpful to publish a table showing how to compare the two.
For example, the pre-registration lists ‘aspirations’ as one of the primary endpoints:
This is defined in the pre-analysis plan as
but I was not able to find it in the paper. Similarly the plan describes a ‘crime index’, based on responses to the village elder survey, and a ‘social integration index’, as other outcomes that will be studied, but I couldn’t find these in the paper.
As a follow-up, this recent NBER paper on people who receive unexpected cash windfalls in Sweden rejected the idea that poverty was the main causal factor behind poor people committing crimes at a higher rate; their non-significant point estimate was in fact that wealth transfers increased crime (though this could easily be noise). It would be good if we could contrast it with the GiveDirectly result, to see if the different environment (random vs predictable, Sweden vs Kenya) made a significant difference.