Guaranteed Income Programs: Single Parents, Spending, and Debt

Sara M. Constantino; Ajay Chaudry; Jonathan Morduch

doi:10.7758/RSF.2026.12.1.09

Article Information

vol. 12 no. 1 220-246

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.1.09

Published By

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Print ISSN

2377-8253

Online ISSN

2377-8261

History

Published online May 13, 2026.

© 2026 Russell Sage Foundation. Constantino, Sara M., Ajay Chaudry, and Jonathan Morduch. 2026. “Guaranteed Income Programs: Single Parents, Spending, and Debt.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 12(1): 220–46. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.1.09. We are grateful to Sidhya Balakrishnan, Sewin Chan, and Johannes Haushofer for their collaboration on the quantitative survey and analyses. In Compton, we are thankful for Mia Hernandez-Perez, Courtnee King, and Kaytlin Ernske’s support in conducting qualitative interviews, both in person and remotely. At NYU, we would like to acknowledge Georgia Assy Hillel, Junyi Ouyang, Julia Raab, Rachael Eplee, Yeji Lee, and Kaytlin Ernske, who provided project management and assistance with transcription and coding. This work benefited from collaboration with the Jain Family Institute, and we are grateful for research support from Ege Aksu, Marcella Cartledge, Roberta Costa, Sara Restrepo, and Yunjie Xie. The qualitative analysis was supported by funding from the Russell Sage Foundation (grant number 2010-28280; ROR: https://ror.org/02yh9se80) and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. We are also grateful for support from the NYU Financial Access Initiative. The quantitative surveys and analysis received generous support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, J-PAL, and private donors. The RCT is registered in the AEA RCT Registry as AEARCTR-0007621. We thank our implementation partner, the USC Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), for their work on survey data collection. We are grateful for insightful feedback from Kathy Edin, Elizabeth Ananat, Carolyn Barnes, Sandra Danziger and the other contributors to this issue. Direct correspondence to: Sara Constantino, at sara.constantino{at}gmail.com, 473 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305, United States. Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Author Information

Sara M. Constantino^a,
Ajay Chaudry^b and
Jonathan Morduch^c

^aAssistant professor of environmental social sciences at the Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States
^bResearch scholar at the Institute of Human Development and Social Change and at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, United States
^cProfessor of public policy and economics at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, United States