The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

I usually describe myself as a very vanilla microeconomist.

Um, I have econ training, uh, and my first job out of college was at J-PAL starting in 2009.

Um, so I, I was really in the right place at the right time, given that my first love is cost-effectiveness analysis, and I spent four years not so much running RCTs, but doing cost effectiveness analyses and kind of brokering evidence, particularly with governments.

And that's where I figured out that I think what I really love is this process of figuring out what the big questions are to be answered, working with big, big organizations who are kind of the tip of the spear in terms of delivery and kind of playing around at that, at that intersection.

Um, I would say what a great empirical question.

Um, it's always the...

I don't know if it's the cheap answer, but it's the right answer of, like, when I think about generalizability, um, you know, I mentioned I started at J-PAL in two thousand and nine.

I feel like when we started and in the very early days, people's conception of generalizability was a yes/no question.

But there's been quite a few projects and programs and efforts in, in development that get there.

So level four evidence lives in independent syntheses from these organizations like Cochrane, Campbell, three IE, J-PAL's Evidence Reviews, WHO guidelines, and several credible causal studies from different places pulled together with something to say about where that effect holds, the limitations, who it's working for, and so on.

So we have bed nets for malaria, cash transfers for school enrollment, iron and folic acid for pregnant women.

The graduation approach to-- It's an asset plus coaching package for the very poor, which funders tested, adapted across countries, and then eventually J-PAL now summarizes from twenty or so random evaluations how this works across a whole bunch of contexts.

Sure.

If we had had this framework in place earlier, are there maybe some policies which were implemented with very mixed success around the world that would've been implemented somewhat less?

So I think there's room to put more weight at the top of these things.

And when we're talking about level four, PEARL four systematic reviews, we may want to formalize them a little bit more so it's not just an ad hoc literature review.

But unless they are consistently revisited, um, and I'm talking with the executive director in, in Steamboat right now about that, they're, they're, they're, they're not necessarily that effective.

The other thing I would say that we're really trying to understand but in the early days, and I think there's a organization called CPAL out of Dallas you might have heard of, Poverty Action Lab, um, is the role of, of media here, and, and how they can play a greater role in paying attention to what's on the dashboard and stories behind it to make it front and center.

'Cause I, I think the challenge is, how do you get the outcomes and the data underneath the, the outcomes front and center on a daily basis, right? And we're trying to practice that in a lot of different ways.

So the jury's still out.

This question of whether and how cash can drive growth across entire economies.

My name is Caitlin Tulloch, and I have spent most of my career studying cost effectiveness, first at J-PAL at MIT, then later at the International Rescue Committee, and eventually at USAID, which is where I first got to work with Dean Carlin.

Today, we'll be diving into this topic in depth and talking about frontier research about how cash transfers, when delivered at massive scale, have the potential to drive growth in entire economies, how we're testing that question to understand it better.

And in particular, this example of a program in Malawi, where over the next several years, we'll be transferring cash equivalent to 85% of GDP across nearly everyone in a whole rural district of Malawi.