Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments, 1970-1974

<p>The Income Maintenance Experiments were originally sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity. They include the Experiments of Negative Income Tax Experiments (NIT). These experiments were designed to measure the effects of instituting an income maintenance plan to replace the current welfare system, with special attention paid to the employment disincentives of such a plan. The Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments (SIME and DIME) were conducted about two years after the original experiments, and were intended to study longer-term effects of the negative income tax. Thus, some families were told they would receive payments for three, five, or as many as twenty years. Denver and Seattle also provided geographic diversity. Also of note, Denver offered a significant Latino population as well as a more stable labor force than Seattle. Both studies covered a 48 month period, where demographic, unearned income, employment, enemployment, earnings, and selected net worth and real property data were collected. Families enrolled had to meet the following criteria: family type either a two-head family or a single-head family with a dependent child; normal family income for single-worker family under $9,000 and for a two-worker family under $11,000 (in 1970-71 dollars); the male head of the family (or female if no male head) age 18 to 58 and capable of gainful employment.</p>