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 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.
Suri, Tavneet, and William Jack. Science Vol. 354, No. 6317 (2016): 1288-1292.
Jack, William, and Tavneet Suri. American Economic Review Vol. 104, No. 1 (2014): 183-223. Download Appendix.
Marx, Benjamin, Vincent Pons, and Tavneet Suri. Journal of Public Economics. Forthcoming.
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.
Bharadwaj, Prashant and Tavneet Suri. AEA Papers and Proceedings Vol. 110, (2020): 584-588.
Banerjee, Abhijit V., Paul Niehaus, and Tavneet Suri. Annual Review of Economics Vol. 11, (2019): 959-983. Download Paper.
A new study suggests that a universal basic income provided stability to impoverished Kenyans in bad times. Could UBI work elsewhere?
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
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.
"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."