We study the effect of cash transfers on health disparities using data from the Department of Veteran Affairs’ Disability Compensation program, one of the nation’s largest cash transfer programs. Our instrumental variables strategy analyzes disability claims and medical records for over 800,000 veterans, leveraging the quasi-random assignment of these claims to two agents: caseworkers and physicians. Cash transfers reduce mortality on average, but there is considerable heterogeneity. Using only the caseworker instrument, we find that receiving $300 per month reduces 5-year mortality by 1.0 pp. Conversely, the physician instrument recovers a significantly smaller effect of 0.4 pp. We reconcile this discrepancy with a reverse selection-on-gains model, in which caseworkers and physicians differentially target cash transfers, but sicker veterans gain the least from transfers. Our findings help explain disparate findings in the literature and provide policy implications for targeting transfers to narrow disability-related health disparities.

We study the enrollment and equity effects of a unique college admissions policy: a preference in admissions for students applying from local high schools. In the mid-2000s, 18 California State University (CSU) campuses were mandated to prioritize applicants from local high schools; however, only nine campuses offered a meaningful local preference in practice, which we call “adherent” campuses. We estimate the effects of exposure to a local admissions preference using a difference-in-differences design that interacts an indicator for being local to an adherent as opposed to a non-adherent campus with an indicator for being pre or post policy implementation. Our results show that the policy induced students to enroll at their local campuses, without evidence of crowd-out from other public four-year colleges in California. Effects are only found for students from high schools with a high share of underrepresented minority (URM) students. As a result, the formally race-blind local preference policy nearly eliminates the pre-existing gap in enrollment at California public four-year colleges between students from high and low URM share high schools.

We conducted a survey experiment to assess whether monetary incentives harm individuals’ intrinsic motivation to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. In our experiment involving 513 vaccine-hesitant adults, 1 in 7 considered getting vaccinated without any monetary incentives but would have declined the vaccine if primed with the idea of such rewards. We find that priming individuals to think about incentives lowered their perceptions of the vaccine’s safety and their prosocial attitudes toward vaccination, accounting for one quarter of the adverse effects on intrinsic motivation. These adverse effects varied significantly by race and gender.