Experimental Design
The study will take place across 325 villages in Western Kenya, with a potential to expand depending on GiveDirectly's future plans. Villages are randomly allocated to treatment or control status. In treatment villages, GiveDirectly enrolls and distributes cash transfers to households that meet its eligibility criteria. In order to generate additional spatial variation in treatment density, groups of villages are assigned to high or low saturation. In high saturation zones, 2/3 of villages are targeted for treatment, while in low saturation zones, 1/3 of villages are targeted for treatment. The randomized assignment to treatment status and the spatial variation in treatment intensity will be used to identify direct and spillover effects of cash transfers.
The research team undertakes independent household censuses of treatment and control villages and makes their own judgment on whether households are eligible based on GiveDirectly's criteria. Households are then randomly selected to be surveyed by eligibility status (roughly 8 eligible households per village and 4 ineligible households). The research team also conducts a census of enterprises, enterprise surveys, market surveys and surveys with local leaders (including school principals) to collect data on prices, enterprise creation and local public finance.