Skip to content

Busara

Busara Main Logo
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
  • Publications
  • Our People
  • What’s Happening
More About Busara
  • External publication

Your gain is my pain: Negative psychological externalities of cash transfers.

Download PDF

Johannes Haushofer, James Reisinger & Jeremy Shapiro

  • October 28, 2015
  • 2:23 am

SECTOR

Behavioral Research and Academic Engagements

PROJECT TYPE

Field & Lab experiments

DOI

Location

Kenya

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Psychology | Cash transfers
OVERVIEW

We use a randomized controlled trial of unconditional cash transfers in Kenya to study the effects of exogenous changes in the wealth of neighbors on psychological wellbeing, consumption, and assets. We find that increases in neighbors’ wealth strongly decrease life satisfaction and moderately decrease consumption and asset holdings. The decrease in life satisfaction induced by transfers to neighbors more than offsets the direct positive effect of transfers, and is largest for individuals who did not receive a direct transfer themselves.

THEMATIC AREAS

We find evidence of hedonic adaptation, in that the negative spillover effect of transfers to neighbors decreases over time, at
a rate similar to that of direct transfers.

RELATED CONTENT

Stress and Temporal Discounting: Do Domains Matter?

August 2, 2020

How Soon Is Now? Evidence of Present Bias from Convex Time Budget Experiments

August 2, 2020

Measuring Self-Efficacy, Executive Function and Temporal Discounting in Kenya

August 2, 2020

Risky Choices and Solidarity: Why Experimental Design Matters

August 2, 2020
1 2 3 … 5 Next »
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
  • Home
  • Publications
  • Our people
  • What’s happening
Facebook Linkedin Twitter Instagram
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
  • More About Busara
  • Join us
We are proud to be a member of

© 2025 Busara | Privacy Policy

Scroll to Top
Manage Cookies

To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. 

Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}