"What would happen if the government gave people cash with no strings attached? Here's what people need to understand about universal basic income. Universal basic income is a concept that has been floated around by politicians and academics. It's this idea that if you provide income to a large group of the population that might result in an improvement in conditions both for the current generation but also subsequent generations. Currently there are a number of small pilot projects throughout the United States and various cities to examine the impact of that. This study takes place in the Great Smoky Mountains and it's an American Indian reservation located in Appalachia. And it's a longitudinal survey and that's really the key in this research environment is the ability to follow the same child year after year into actually adulthood. What that has allowed us to do is to look at the impact of the opening of a tribal casino. We have a before, we have an after, we have a group that gets affected by the tribal casino and the cash transfers and we have a group that doesn't. So in our first study using this data we find that the children from the households that receive this cash transfer and in particular the children from households that were in poverty we see the largest effects there. And we see their probability of completing high school go up in a statistically significant and positive manner. We see that the number of years of education by age 21 are about a year longer. In an extension to the analysis that we originally conducted we were able to identify through public voting records the individuals who were raised in these households with higher income compared to their counterparts that were not. And what we found is that the children from these households were more likely to participate at a higher percentage rate in elections every single year during their adulthood. One other subset of analyses that we conducted is a look at a variety of psychopathologies and one of the findings we have is that there's a reduction of one to two symptoms in depression or anxiety for the children who are coming from these households. That may help explain why they're able to achieve higher levels of education and attainment overall. In this situation we can really see what sort of releasing that lever or that constraint of poverty does for children's outcomes and we would expect that this would be a result that would be that would translate to other populations as well."