How big are the intra-household spillovers for cash transfers and psychotherapy? Contribute your prediction for our analysis.

By JoelMcGuire @ 2021-12-08T16:37 (+15)

At the Happier Lives Institute, we’re working on some updates to our cost-effectiveness comparison of cash transfers and psychotherapy. The main question we are investigating is: how do other members of a household benefit relative to the direct recipient of the intervention? 

In the first version of the analysis, we only estimated the effects on the direct beneficiaries of those interventions and decided not to include the ‘intra-household spillover effects’ (the impact on the recipient’s family or the other household members who do not receive the intervention). We excluded these because of the considerable uncertainty about the relative magnitude of spillovers across interventions and the slim evidence available to estimate the household spillover effects.

Our updated report  will summarise the literature on how these interventions affect the subjective well-being and mental health of the recipient’s households (not only the direct recipient). As part of this next step in the research project, we are collecting people’s predictions/priors on the relative benefit of a household member to a direct recipient of these interventions. We may use these predictions in our analysis. 

To contribute your predictions, please fill out this survey.