Dennis Egger

They're actually all subject to the effects that we're trying to identify.

And so the design of this study, this is one led by Dennis Egger and, and friends, who's a kind of deep, deep collaborator with GiveDirectly in Kenya.

It did this multi-stage randomization where you're choosing kind of areas of western Kenya, um, in Siaya County, allocating some of them to get higher saturation, so a greater fraction of the villages, um, in that area are gonna get cash transfers, and others to be lower saturation.

And then within those units, you're doing a second level of randomization, which is, okay, in, you know, high saturation units, you know, you gotta randomize some of the villages or, or clusters into receiving cash or not.

Let's do a big experiment where there's a huge infusion and a lot of investment in measurements and a lot of careful attention to this and let's track how it plays out.

And that's what we saw from the Egger study in Kenya.

When the Egger study was studying spillovers from cash, they weren't the first to study spillovers from cash.

They were the first to do it at such scale and such attention to the myriad of ways that it can spill over.

That's what made that pathbreaking was the thoroughness and the size of that effort.

And this was actually one of the criticisms of microcredit, was doing that.

The canonical corner store, which just makes it so that people walk a block less, but there's another corner store and someone else is selling less.

One of the things we learn from Eggers is if that's happening, it might be happening to some extent.