Heterogeneity in Effects of Poverty-Alleviating Interventions

To what extent are poverty-alleviating interventions general tools? We revisit a 415-village cluster-randomized field experiment involving 8,300 women living in poverty in rural Kenya. We estimate the extent of heterogeneity in a cash transfer intervention, an aspirations-improving workshop, and their combination using median split regressions and causal forests. We find no evidence of heterogeneity with respect to a prespecified set of demographic, psychological, and economic welfare characteristics. We conclude that the poverty-alleviating interventions we consider are general tools that can assist a broad range of households experiencing poverty and economic shocks.