Firstly, the recipient is plausibly not the only person impacted by a cash transfer. They can share it with their partner, children, and even friends or neighbours. Such sharing should benefit non-recipients’ well-being. However, it’s also possible that any benefit that non-recipients receive could be offset by envy of their neighbour’s good fortune. There appears to be no evidence of significant negative within-village spillover effects, but there is some evidence for positive within-household and across-village spillover effects. We have not included these spillover effects in our main analysis because of the large uncertainty about the relative magnitude of spillovers across interventions and the slim evidence available to estimate the household spillover effects.
I may be misremembering, but doesn’t GiveDirectly give to whole villages at a time, anyway, making negative spillover very unlikely? If that’s the case, it seems like all of the spillover effects should be positive (in expectation).
Do you have any thoughts on how the spillover effects of these interventions might compare, and is there any interest in looking further into this? Mental health interventions may also improve productivity (and so increase income), and people’s mental health can affect others (especially family, and parents’ mental health on children in particular) in important ways. On the other hand, people build wealth (and other resources, including human capital) within their communities, and cash transfers/deworming could facilitate this, but this may happen over longer time scales.
I would guess the effects on SWB through increased income for the direct beneficiaries of StrongMinds are already included in the measurements of effects on SWB, assuming the research participants were similar demographically (including in income, importantly) as the beneficiaries of StrongMinds.
EDIT: Saw this in your post:
That being said, even if we take the upper range of GiveDirectly’s total effect on the household of the recipient (8 SDs), psychotherapy is still around twice as cost-effective.
Hi Michael and thank you for your comments and engaging with our work!
I may be misremembering, but doesn’t GiveDirectly give to whole villages at a time, anyway, making negative spillover very unlikely? If that’s the case, it seems like all of the spillover effects should be positive (in expectation).
To my understanding, GiveDirectly gives cash transfers to everyone in a village who is eligible. GiveWell says this means almost everyone in a village receives CTs in Kenya and Uganda but not Rwanda (note that GiveDirectly no longer works in Uganda). So it seems like negative spillovers are still possible. However, I think you’re still right that it makes negative spillovers less likely.
Do you have any thoughts on how the spillover effects of these interventions might compare, and is there any interest in looking further into this?
It’s tough to say how the (intra-household) spillovers compare. I guess that CTs could provide a bit more benefit to the household than psychotherapy, but I am very uncertain about this.
My thinking is that household spillovers are at least what your family gets for having you be happier. As you say, “people’s mental health can affect others (especially family, and parents’ mental health on children in particular) in important ways.” I expect this to be about balanced across interventions. Then there are the other benefits, which I think will mostly be pecuniary. In this case, it seems like cash transfers if shared, will boost the household’s consumption more than psychotherapy. Again, we are quite uncertain about how spillovers compare across interventions, but it seems important to figure out what’s going on at least within the household. I can go into more detail if you’d like.
We are very interested in looking further into how the spillover effects of these interventions might compare, particularly intra-household spillovers. But as you might guess, the existing evidence is very slim. To advance the question we need to either wait for more primary research to be done or ask researchers for their data and do the analysis ourselves. We will revisit this topic after we’ve looked into other interventions.
I would guess the effects on SWB through increased income for the direct beneficiaries of StrongMinds are already included in the measurements of effects on SWB, assuming the research participants were similar demographically (including in income, importantly) as the beneficiaries of StrongMinds
I may be misremembering, but doesn’t GiveDirectly give to whole villages at a time, anyway, making negative spillover very unlikely? If that’s the case, it seems like all of the spillover effects should be positive (in expectation).
Do you have any thoughts on how the spillover effects of these interventions might compare, and is there any interest in looking further into this? Mental health interventions may also improve productivity (and so increase income), and people’s mental health can affect others (especially family, and parents’ mental health on children in particular) in important ways. On the other hand, people build wealth (and other resources, including human capital) within their communities, and cash transfers/deworming could facilitate this, but this may happen over longer time scales.
I would guess the effects on SWB through increased income for the direct beneficiaries of StrongMinds are already included in the measurements of effects on SWB, assuming the research participants were similar demographically (including in income, importantly) as the beneficiaries of StrongMinds.
EDIT: Saw this in your post:
Hi Michael and thank you for your comments and engaging with our work!
To my understanding, GiveDirectly gives cash transfers to everyone in a village who is eligible. GiveWell says this means almost everyone in a village receives CTs in Kenya and Uganda but not Rwanda (note that GiveDirectly no longer works in Uganda). So it seems like negative spillovers are still possible. However, I think you’re still right that it makes negative spillovers less likely.
It’s tough to say how the (intra-household) spillovers compare. I guess that CTs could provide a bit more benefit to the household than psychotherapy, but I am very uncertain about this.
My thinking is that household spillovers are at least what your family gets for having you be happier. As you say, “people’s mental health can affect others (especially family, and parents’ mental health on children in particular) in important ways.” I expect this to be about balanced across interventions. Then there are the other benefits, which I think will mostly be pecuniary. In this case, it seems like cash transfers if shared, will boost the household’s consumption more than psychotherapy. Again, we are quite uncertain about how spillovers compare across interventions, but it seems important to figure out what’s going on at least within the household. I can go into more detail if you’d like.
We are very interested in looking further into how the spillover effects of these interventions might compare, particularly intra-household spillovers. But as you might guess, the existing evidence is very slim. To advance the question we need to either wait for more primary research to be done or ask researchers for their data and do the analysis ourselves. We will revisit this topic after we’ve looked into other interventions.
I think that’s pretty much correct!