What Did We Learn from the North American Income Maintenance Experiments? New Data and Evidence on Household Behavior and Labor Supply

Chris Riddell and W. Craig Riddell ()
Additional contact information
W. Craig Riddell: University of British Columbia, Vancouver

No 18174, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We re-assess the consequences of a NIT for two-parent families, utilizing hitherto untapped data. The Gary and Seattle experiments fail balancing tests. In New Jersey, Denver and Manitoba we estimate far greater labor supply responses than the current consensus, with remarkable consistency in point estimates and statistical significance across experiments, genders and countries. On the other hand, using newly collected data from archival records, we estimate substantial increases in happiness, marital satisfaction, household production, and social activities in Manitoba. We also reject the contentious finding that the NIT increased marital separations in Seattle-Denver, which is driven solely by Seattle.

Keywords: household well-being; marital satisfaction; labour supply; income support; Negative Income Tax; basic income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I38 J12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-lab and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18174.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What did we learn from the North American income maintenance experiments? New data and evidence on household behavior and labor supply (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18174

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().