Paternalism, Dead Weight Loss of Giving and Giving Directly

While there are many articles on the dead-weight loss of Christmas (See Joel Waldfogel's paper of that title), my Coauthor Paul Niehaus, together with Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo, and Jeremy Shapiro investigates a similar idea on charitable donations, specifically to the poor in Africa.

His work has recently been featured in The Atlantic: Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever? The premise on GiveDirectly is to "directly to the poor with no strings attached--no requirement to launch a business or to immunize one's child; no distribution of bed nets, solar lanterns, or goats."