Demonstrating Basic Income Effects in the United States

The Jain Family Institute (JFI) is a NYC-based research incubator that builds promising ideas into real-world projects. JFI collaborates with industry, government, and academia to pilot scalable, high-impact interventions. Their recent project, the Economic Security Project (ESP), aims to advance the conversation on cash benefits and basic income in the United States. The upcoming Basic Income demonstration in Stockton, CA proposes to bring sweeping changes to the economy of the once bankrupt city. JFI partnered with a SIPA team to assist with analyzing the landscape and creating a data collection instrument for the pilot.  The team has conducted an expansive literature review; developed a comprehensive online and paper survey capturing demographic, social, psychological, and work outcomes; interviewed multiple stakeholders and administered the survey to 44 respondents during a field visit in March 2018; and aggregated and analyzed the survey results. The final report summarizes the SIPA team’s findings and presents recommendations and final thoughts for study design, future survey administration and program implementation. Recommendations include greater sensitivity to the stakeholder “constellation” within Stockton, CA, for both design and implementation purposes, an argument for firm-level randomization to examine network effects, and the use of ethnography to complement the project’s storytelling goals. The SIPA team concludes by recommending the following areas for further exploration: translation of the survey tool into more localized Spanish, adjusting the length of the survey, and accounting for Asian-Americans within the ultimate sample size.