The Freakonomics podcast covered this. There have been small-scale examples of this sort of thing but the best researched one is from Georgia. The tl;dr is tha

The Freakonomics podcast covered this. There have been small-scale examples of this sort of thing but the best researched one is from Georgia. The tl;dr is that the government stole a huge chunk of land from the Cherokee but the white public got really angry because the politicians intended to split up the land among themselves. To avoid being tossed out of office they setup a lottery and distributed the land randomly. About 20% of Georgia's white population at the time got a huge chunk of land for free. The study shows it didn't have much of an impact on families over the long-term. The paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19348 http://www.nber.org/papers/w19348 The podcast: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/would-a-big-bucket-of-cash-really-change-your-life-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/would-a-big-bucket-of-cash-r...