Esther Duflo: belief

Transcript context

…My first question has to do with what, I think, is maybe your most important paper. And that’s the 2015 paper in Science with Abhijit, Dean Karlan, and some other coauthors. There you show that a cash transfer to the very poor, combined with training and coaching, has super-high rates of return. Why don’t people study that more? It seems to be the most potent intervention we have to fight poverty, other than migration. I think it has been studied a lot. It has also been adopted as policy after this original study and other studies. The original project comes from Bangladesh, and there actually has been a study and a long-run study in Bangladesh by Robin Burgess and others who are now looking at households 10 years hence. And you continue to see large differences between the households who got the transfer. And they have a recent paper that they just released to say that they continue to study it, where they are really putting a lot of theory into it to look at the data through the lens of asking, actually, is there a poverty trap in which some of these households have fallen? They show that, in fact, there is such a thing with a threshold of wealth above which — if households can go above — they can grow to a point where they are significantly better off. And if they are below it, they go back to wherever they came from. I think that’s a very important paper that is making a big splash and show people continue. In our case, the part of the study that I was most involved with was in West Bengal. We also continued to study them after 10 years. We are studying their children as well. We are studying the impact on migration to go through not just, “Oh, wait, there is an effect,” but how all of these effects are building on each other. As I understand the paper, there’s a cost-benefit ratio of 133 percent to 433 percent across six countries. That’s enormous. What exactly about the mentor makes the difference as opposed to just giving people cash? What is the mentor or the coach actually teaching?…

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