Studying innovative cash-based interventions – including guaranteed income and baby bonds – to understand their promise for building a more inclusive economy

With income and wealth inequality in the U.S. at near-record levels, it’s important to consider interventions that directly reduce inequality and that aim to establish minimum income and wealth floors. Direct cash supplements to income, such as guaranteed income (GI) or basic income – and parallel supplements to wealth, such as baby bonds – are a potentially powerful approach. CPI’s Economic Inclusion Lab studies the effects of such cash policies on poverty, wealth inequality, and other outcomes.

One of the Center’s major projects examines the effects of California’s state-funded guaranteed income pilots on health outcomes, a collaboration with David Rehkopf (Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences), Melissa Bondy (Stanford Department of Epidemiology and Population Health), and other faculty at Stanford and other institutions.

Our capacity in the Economic Inclusion area expanded in 2023 when the Stanford Basic Income Lab (BIL) became part of the Center on Poverty and Inequality. Founded by former Stanford philosophy professor Juliana Bidadanure, who remains a Senior Advisor to the lab, BIL serves as a leading online repository of data about basic income programs in the US and globally. BIL also convenes stakeholders to examine the politics, philosophy, economics, and implementation of basic income and related cash policies, and developed the well-known “basic income toolkit” that’s informed the design and implementation of pilots and experiments around the world.

CPI also has an active research agenda examining cash-based strategies to address wealth inequality – such as baby bonds. By providing children with trust funds that can be used to pay for college, start a business, buy a home, or support other investments during the transition to adulthood, baby bonds aim to make it possible for children born into low-wealth families to access opportunities that are typically closed off to them. The Center is partnering, for example, with Darrick Hamilton and other scholars at the New School Institute on Race, Power, & Political Economy to examine whether wealth and income floors, when enacted together, may have synergistic effects. CPI’s Faculty Director David Grusky and Executive Director Sara Kimberlin also serve on the Advisory Working Group supporting the implementation of California’s recently launched state-funded baby bonds initiative, the California HOPE for Children Trust Account Program.