The lncome Maintenance

Between 1968 and 1978 four negative income tax experiments were conducted; they were designed to measure labor supply and earnings. The experiments were not designed to measure the effects of government programs on such demographic behavior as marital dissolution, fertility, family composition, or the decision to marry or remarry. Nevertheless, the data from the experiments have been used to analyze all these family issues, and they are the subject of this paper. The essential reform examined in the negative income tax experiments was the extension of a guaranteed minimum income to poor families with an able-bodied, non-aged husband or father as the potential provider. The income plans tested in the experiments were expected to lead to reductions in the labor supply and earnings of the participating married-couple families. By a twist of fate, however, the most influential research finding of the experiments turned out to be not about labor supply but about marital stability, a family issue. The findings on labor supply showed reductions neither large enough nor small enough to permit a definitive verdict about the negative income tax. In contrast, the findings about marital stability appeared decisive. The most important research on marital stability was conducted by Groeneveld, Hannan, and Tuma, based on the Seattle-Denver income maintenance experimer~t.1 They concluded that the negative income tax increased marital dissolutions, even though it had been designed to