What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?

We are grateful for helpful comments from seminar participants at the BREAD/NBER Program Meeting, Brown University Bravo/SNSF Workshop, Cornell University Young Researchers Workshop, Duke University, UChicago AI in Social Science Conference, UChicago Machine Learning in Economics Summer Conference, Harvard Data Science Institute, University of Maryland Workshop on AI and Analytics for Social Good, INFORMS, Stanford Econometrics, Stanford Statistics, and Yale University. We thank Apollinaire Abi, Alia Aghajanian, Vincent Armentano, Anik Ashraf, Oscar Barriga Cabanillas, Lina Cardona-Sosa, S. Chandrasekhar, Grown Chirongwe, Oeindrilla Dube, Elizabeth Foster, Tanzed Hossain, Roy Katayama, Patricia Koka, Arsène Koyangbo, Daniel Mahler, Juan Manuel Monroy Barragan, Jose Mpesayabo, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, Fabrice Mukendi Mutombo, Nicolas Ndayishimiye, Noé Nduwabike, Iary Rakotondradany, Khaled Saad, Nozipho Shabalala, Dhiraj Sharma, David Stifel, Jonathan Weigel, and Christina Weiser for their generous assistance accessing and interpreting data; Puneet Bhaskar, Qiqi Chen, Nolan Chu, Michael Cleary, Karl Gorski, Neela Kaushik, Henry Lopez Rodriguez, Matthewos Mesfin, Francesca Vescia, and Victor Zhenyi Wang for help with data preparation; and Aditi Acharya, Erick Rosas Lopez, and Shruthi Ramesh for excellent research assistance. This work was partially supported by NSF grant SES-2242876, a Stanford BGS Research Fund grant, and by gifts from Luke Ding and from the Manglaben Chimanbhai Patel Family Foundation. RS was supported by a Stanford Data Science Fellowship and a Stanford DARE (Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence) Fellowship. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• December 15, 2025