This session opens with Nikhil Woodruff of the UBI Center, who presents research on optimizing UBI policy design to minimize disruption. Aleida Baumgartner reviews the empirical literature around UBI and income inequality. Almaz Zelleke closes by proposing to individualize taxation as a step to UBI.

The Impact of an Unconditional Basic Income on Income Inequality in the United States by Aleida Baumgartner

Nikhil Woodruff, UBI Center / PolicyEngine

Nikhil is the UK research director of the UBI Center, a think-tank analysing universal basic income policies, and co-founder and CTO of PolicyEngine, a non-profit enabling anyone to compute the impact of public policy.

Aleida Baumgartner is an MA student in Economics at New York University. Their research interests include labor economics, poverty, and economic inequality. Aleida earned a BS in Economics from George Mason University.

Almaz Zelleke (PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Practice in Political Science at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches political science and comparative political economy and was until recently the director the undergraduate Social Science major. Her academic interests are in political theory and public policy, feminist political theory, and comparative political economy. Her articles on basic income, distributive justice, welfare policy, and feminist political theory have been published in Basic Income Studies, Political Quarterly, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Policy and Politics, Review of Social Economy, and Journal of Socio-Economics. For more information, visit almazzelleke.com.

Acknowledged by Andrew Yang as one of those who helped shape his thinking, Scott Santens has lived with a crowdfunded basic income since 2016 and has been researching and advocating for universal basic income around the world since 2013. He is the author of Let There Be Money and is currently Senior Advisor to Humanity Forward while also serving on the board of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and as the editor of Basic Income Today - a daily UBI news hub. His home is in Washington, D.C. where he just moved from New Orleans with his wife Katie.

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The distributional impacts of universal basic income policies