Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Guaranteed Income
This paper provides new evidence on the causal relationship between income and short-term health in the United States. We study a randomized experiment in which 1,000 low-income adults age 21 to 40 received $1,000 per month for three years with 2,000 control participants receiving $50 monthly over that same period, from November 2020 until October 2023. The cash transfer resulted in large but short-lived improvements in stress and food security, greater use of hospital and emergency department care, and increased medical spending in the treatment relative to the control group. The use of other office-based care—particularly dental care—may also have increased as a result of the transfer. However, over the three year time horizon that we study, we find no effect of the transfer across several measures of physical health, and we can rule out even very small improvements. The transfer also did not improve mental health after the first year and by year 2 we can again reject very small improvements. We also find precise null effects on self-reported access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and several other measures related to preventive care and health behaviors. We find no effect of the transfer on the health of participants’ children, but we do find that children in treated households were more likely to be up to date on their vaccinations.
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Copy CitationSarah Miller, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Patrick K. Krause, and Eva Vivalt, "Does Income Affect Health? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Guaranteed Income," NBER Working Paper 32711 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3386/w32711.Download Citation
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