Ideas Made to Matter
How 75 cents a day helped Kenyans weather bad times
A new study suggests that a universal basic income provided stability to impoverished Kenyans in bad times. Could UBI work elsewhere?
Faculty
Tavneet Suri
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About
Tavneet Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her expertise is in the role of technology in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Tavneet is editor-in-chief of VoxDev; Scientific Director for Africa for J-PAL; CoChair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at J-PAL; Chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
She holds a BA in economics from Cambridge University, UK, and an MA in International and Development Economics (IDE) and a PhD in economics, both from Yale University.
Honors
Publications
Featured Publication
"The Long-run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money."
Suri, Tavneet, and William Jack. Science Vol. 354, No. 6317 (2016): 1288-1292.
Featured Publication
"Risk Sharing and Transaction Costs: Evidence from Kenya's Mobile Money Revolution."
Jack, William, and Tavneet Suri. American Economic Review Vol. 104, No. 1 (2014): 183-223. Download Appendix.
"Effects of a Universal Basic Income During the Pandemic."
Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6171-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, September 2020.
"Universal Basic Income in the Developing World."
Banerjee, Abhijit V., Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri. Annual Review of Economics Vol. 11, (2019): 959-983. Download Paper.
"Agricultural Technology and Nutrition in Sierra Leone."
Suri, Tavneet, and Rachel Glennerster, Working Paper. 2018.
"Can Digital Loans Deliver? Take Up and Impacts of Digital Loans in Kenya."
Bharadwaj, Prashant, William Jack, and Tavneet Suri, Working Paper. 2018.
Recent Insights
Press
A Universal Basic Income could help the world’s poorest weather crises
A new study examining the effect of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Kenya shows that cash transfers improved recipients’ food security and health and these gains sustained through the policy responses
Sep 30, 2020
Media Highlights
Source: HuffPost
The radical idea of making sure everybody has enough money to live on
The program in Kenya is a big deal in the UBI world...“We don't check if you're rich or poor; we give it to everybody,” said Tavneet Suri.
Faculty:
Tavneet Suri
Source: The Conversation (Opinion Piece)
Universal basic income helped Kenyans weather COVID-19 - but it's not a ...
"The onset of the coronavirus prompted my colleagues and I to look at how universal basic income affected how people coped with a severe shock."
Faculty:
Tavneet Suri