In the search for ways to reform the flawed current welfare system, some form of basic income guarantee has received more attention. My colleague Michael Tanner has reviewed some of the related pros and cons, but most of those studies confined themselves to the immediate to short-run impact on work, leaving many important questions unanswered. A new paper from Daniel Price co-authored with Jae Song offers one of the first studies to analyze the long-term impact of cash assistance from the negative income experiments that took place last century. Their findings suggest “unintended and unexpected long-term consequences for recipients” and ambiguous effects on their children. It’s important to understand these effects when considering ways to try to address the many problems with the troubled status quo.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when interest in a basic income was at a peak, there were large-scale evaluations of the idea of unconditional cash transfers in the Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments (SIME and DIME, respectively). Recipients were given an unconditional cash transfer that was phased out as earned income rose, for a period of either three or five years. There were a host of studies analyzing the impact on poverty, work impact, and other measures, but these were more focused on the short-term effects.
This paper is so important because, as the authors explain, “virtually no other research has been conducted on the impact of cash assistance—or, indeed, any other type of government assistance—on beneficiaries themselves long after the assistance has ended.” Some of this is due to data limitations, and the authors are able to combine SIME/DIME date with administrative records from the Social Security Administration and the Washington State Department of Health.
The impact on poverty and material hardship is more straightforward and easier to measure, but some of the effects on work effort and other measures are still not as well understood. In this paper the authors find some evidence that participation did seem to have an impact on both work and earnings later in life for adult recipients. Participation reduced the probability a worker was active in any given year by 3.3 percentage points, and decreased average earnings by $1,800 (about 7.4 percent of mean annual earnings).
Another way to put it: for each $1 in additional government transfers, the authors find that an individual’s discounted lifetime earnings are $4.50 lower.
Impact on Propensity to Work and Earnings for Parents, by Age
Source: Price and Song (2016).
Notes: Each data point represents the estimate and 95% confidence interval of the coefficient on a dummy for financial treatment status in one regression, limiting the sample to data from individuals when they are a certain age. Earnings variables are based on one observation per year for all years between 1978 and 2013.