Study of Stockton guaranteed income pilot finds pandemic dampened positive results

STOCKTON’S EXPERIMENT IN guaranteed income — which paid more than 100 residents $500 a month with no strings attached — likely improved the recipients’ financial stability and health, but those effects were much less pronounced during the pandemic, researchers found.

The study of the two-year experiment that began in 2019 shows the promise and limitations of a guaranteed income, said Amy Castro, a study author and founding director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.