What the basic income pilots found
Universal basic income appears on 6 recent papers and unconditional cash transfers on 4, although large pilots in the US, Germany, Kenya and elsewhere have reported results in the last two years. What do the pilots agree on, where do they disagree, and what would scale change?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 12 papers carry a basic-income, guaranteed-income or unconditional-cash keyword (11 in economics journals): "universal basic income" on 6, "unconditional cash transfers" on 4, "guaranteed income" on 2. The recent large pilots, with thousands of recipients and multi-year payments, have produced results that barely appear in these journals yet.
Questions
- Across the pilots, how much did recipients reduce paid work, and did the hours go to care, education or job search?
- Did health, housing stability and children's outcomes improve by enough to offset the cost?
- What would differ at scale: prices, labour supply of non-recipients, and financing through taxes?
Data that could help
Published pilot data (the US OpenResearch study, the German Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen, GiveDirectly's Kenya experiment), and administrative records where pilots were linked to them.
Next step
Tabulate the labour supply, income and well-being effects reported by each pilot on a common scale and compare them with the predictions of standard models.