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?
Oct 1, 2020
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Tavneet Suri
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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.
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Publications
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.
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.
"Agricultural Technology and Nutrition in Sierra Leone."
Suri, Tavneet, and Rachel Glennerster, Working Paper. 2018.
"Agricultural Technology in Africa."
Suri, Tavneet and Christopher Udry. Journal of Economic Perspectives Vol. 36, No. 1 (2022): 33-56.
"Borrowing Requirements, Credit Access, and Adverse Selection: Evidence from Kenya."
Jack, William, Michael Kremer, Joost de Laat, and Tavneet Suri, MIT Sloan Working Paper 5044-13. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, September 2019.
"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
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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
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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.
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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."
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