Universal Cash Transfers and Food Hardship: Evidence from Google Trends Data

• In Event: Place, Poverty, and Safety Net Assistance across State and Local Contexts

Abstract

While an old idea, universal cash transfers have regained interest among the public, policymakers, and social scientists as a means to improve health and economic outcomes for vulnerable households. Yet, existing evidence is surprisingly mixed: quasi-experimental studies show that income-support policies reduce food hardship but several recent randomized controlled trials find null results. While these field experiments test the effects of unconditional cash, recruitment criteria, such as income cutoffs, prevent them from speaking to the effects of universal cash. Treatment groups are small relative to the population at large; therefore, it is unclear if these null findings would apply at scale. For example, hardship reduction may be stronger in contexts where entire communities or kinship networks receive assistance, such as in the case of universal cash transfers.I fill this gap in the literature by leveraging annual variation in the disbursement date of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD)—a yearly cash payment for which nearly all Alaskans are eligible—using a synthetic difference-in-differences estimator. Given the lack of appropriate survey data, I use Google Trends data on weekly search intensity for terms plausibly related to food hardship as a proxy measure.  My results suggest that PFD disbursement reduces food hardship by 39 percent of a standard deviation over five weeks. This finding is robust to a variety of alternative specifications and placebo checks. Reductions in food hardship are concentrated in the week of treatment and the weeks immediately following with effect sizes fading within one month. In years with more generous PFD amounts, reductions in food hardship are somewhat larger. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I find no impacts on food hardship, which suggests that other policy supports during this period, such as expanded unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and eviction moratoriums, rendered the marginal impact of the PFD on food hardship negligible.





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Apologies reviewer - this is extra text to get well over the 300 word cap, the portal is a little wonky with word count.
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Author

• Christopher L. Pulliam, CUNY Graduate Center
  Presenting Author