America’s public safety net

[Research Highlight]

March 18, 2025

Christopher Howard discusses the history of public assistance and social insurance in the United States.

Sustainable Poverty Reduction through Social Assistance: Modality, Context, and Complementary Programming in Bangladesh

By Akhter Ahmed, Melissa Hidrobo, John Hoddinott, Bastien Kolt, Shalini Roy, and Salauddin Tauseef

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2025

Social assistance programs can increase consumption and reduce poverty, but less is known about whether these impacts are sustained after programs end or how design and context influence sustainability. Using data collected in two regions of Bangladesh fo...

Climate shocks and the economy

[Research Highlight]

April 29, 2025

Is the US economy adapting to more severe weather patterns?

How Do Entrants Build Market Share? The Role of Demand Frictions

By David Argente, Doireann Fitzgerald, Sara Moreira, and Anthony Priolo

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

We construct a new dataset to show that successful entrants in the consumer food sector build market share by adding new customers. Entrants reach new customers by entering more geographical markets, placing their product in more stores in these markets, ...

The Effect of Emergency Financial Assistance on Mobility, SNAP Receipt, and Presence of Dependents

By Daniel Hungerman, David C. Phillips, Kevin Rinz, James X. Sullivan, and David N. Wasser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

This paper studies emergency financial assistance for people at risk of homelessness using federal tax and census data. We use an established quasi-experimental research design to examine how assistance affects address histories, number of children, and r...

Private Markets and Public Assistance for Natural Disaster Supplies

By Michael Dinerstein, Nadia Lucas, Ishan Nath, and Johanna Rayl

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We document existing allocation mechanisms for natural disaster survival goods, such as flashlights, batteries, food, and water and show that Americans face widespread and frequent exposure to natural disasters, that disasters bring a substantial risk of ...

Financial Spillover Effects from Electronic Government Transfers: Evidence from an At-Scale Experiment in Indonesia

By Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Elan Satriawan, and Sudarno Sumarto

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

In 2018, Indonesia launched a new electronic voucher system for distribution of food subsidies in randomly selected districts. Banks were assigned the goal of operating at least two remote banking agents in each village in selected districts. We find that...

Mean Reversion in Randomized Controlled Trials: Implications for Program Targeting and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

By Marcella Alsan, John Cawley, Joseph J. Doyle, and Nicholas Skelley

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Eligibility criteria for interventions can induce an Ashenfelter Dip, and subsequent mean reversion results in improvement over time even absent the intervention. We investigate these dynamics for a food-as-medicine program to treat diabetes, where eligib...

Food Transfers and Child Nutrition: Evidence from India's Public Distribution System

By Aditya Shrinivas, Kathy Baylis, and Benjamin Crost

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

India's National Food Security Act of 2013 (NFSA) led to one of the biggest expansions in food transfers in history, affecting over 500 million people. We use plausibly exogenous variation created by the NFSA to estimate the effect of food transfers on ch...