This paper provides new evidence on the causal relationship between income and health by studying a randomized experiment in which 1,000 low-income adults in the United States received $1,000 per month for three years, and 2,000 control participants received $50 over the same period. The transfer led to large but short-lived improvements in depression and food security, greater use of hospital and emergency department care, and increased medical use of about $20 per month in treatment relative to the control group. Our results also suggest that use of other office-based care—particularly dental care—may increase as a result of referrals. However, we do not find a transferable effect on several measures of physical health as captured by many well-validated test measures and biomarkers taken from blood draws. We can rule out even the smallest improvement in physical health and the resulting inverse correlation between income and health is outside of our confidence intervals. We also find that the transfer did not improve mental health after the first year and in year 2 we can again reject very little improvement. We also find null effects for self-reported access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and several other measures related to preventive care and health behaviors. Our results imply that more targeted interventions may be more effective in reducing health inequalities between high-income and low-income people, at least in the population and time period we studied.
That’s according to a new NBER working paper on
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