Content by Keyword: Employment/Self-Sufficiency

The interested reader is referred to the two-volume Final Report of the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983) for a complete discussion of the design, administration, and results of SIME/DIME.  Below is the Table of Contents for that report.

1.  These correspond to 95%, 120%, and 140% of the official poverty line for a family of four ($4,000 in 1971 dollars).  The relationship of these levels to the poverty line was preserved throughout the experimental period by adjusting the dollar guarantee levels regularly according to increases in the Consumer Price Index, as in the poverty lin

With respect to the counseling/training subsidy results, two major points deserve emphasis.  Participation in both the counseling and training-education programs was strongly related to the amount of the subsidy.  Both the 50 percent and 100 percent subsidy plans induced statistically significant increases in formal schooling (although not work-

The work responses to be expected from transfer programs of varying generosity are much more precisely know as a result of SIME/DIME than they were before.  It is now possible, as a consequence of the SIME/DIME labor supply analysis, to predict with some confidence how much more or less people will work as a result of new policy initiatives and w

How can the SIME/DIME results be used as a guide to the possible effects on family structure of new public policy initiatives?  The analyst themselves "caution the reader against uncritically extrapolating from these or any other summary measure of the effects of SIME/DIME on marital dissolution." (11)   They stress as reasons for this statement

Although, as mentioned earlier, the experiment was not explicitly designed to test effects on marital stability, much attention was paid to the issue in terms of both data collection and analysis.  To the extent that the effects of the experiment on marital dissolution were expected to depend on the guarantee and the tax rate, and to the extent t

A unique feature of SIME/DIME among the four NIT experiments was the testing of a labor market counseling and training subsidy program in addition to a negative income tax transfer program.  The rationale for including these programs was to determine whether increased labor market information and increased education and training could offset the

The labor supply results for husbands, wives, female family heads, and youth will be summarized in turn.  For each group, the overall response to the SIME/DIME negative income tax plans taken together is described first.  A discussion of differences in response among the different NIT plans follows.

The major SIME/DIME results are presented under three headings.  First, the effects of the experiment on work effort or labor supply are presented.  The primary focus is the effect of eligibility for a negative income tax plan, but the analysis sample used to obtain these findings includes all families enrolled in the experiments, including thos

The composition of the SIME/DIME sample was defined partly with reference to the likely population to be included in any national negative income tax program and partly to assure that important questions about the magnitude of the overall work effort response and about possible differential responses by different population groups could be satisfa

The primary data for analysis of behavioral responses to the experiment came from a series of face-to-face interviews administered three times a year, for the duration of the treatment period and at least one year beyond.  These took about forty minutes each, were administered in the families' homes by specially trained interviewers, and were ide

The cash transfer treatment, as has been noted, was defined by a guarantee and a tax rate.  The amount of payment actually received by a family was calculated according to information regarding non-experimental income, assets, and expenses contained in a monthly Income Report Form submitted by the family to the SIME/DIME payments office.  This i

There were three variants of the counseling/training subsidy treatments:  counseling only, counseling combined with a 50% subsidy for approved education (5) or training courses, and counseling combined with a 100% subsidy for approved education or training.  Within a family enrolled in the counseling/training subsidy programs, every family memb

The cash transfer treatment tested in SIME/DIME, as in the previous income maintenance experiments, consisted of a series of negative income tax plans.  A negative income tax is simply a cash transfer program in which there is (a) a maximum benefit (called the guarantee) for which a family is eligible if it has no other income and (b) a rate (cal

SIME/DIME was launched in Seattle, Washington, in 1970 and extended in 1972 to a second site in Denver, Colorado.  The prime contractors for SIME/DIME were the States of Washington and Colorado, which subcontracted with SIR International for the design, operation, and research evaluation of the experiment.  SRI International, in turn, subcontrac

We have been discussing random assignment of treatment to subjects in an experimental study.  One "treatment" that is frequently tested is no treatment at all, in order words the "control" treatment.  Families or individuals enrolled in the control group are not eligible for any special benefit or services, but provide the same information to th

Other things equal, the larger the sample size, the greater the ability of an experiment to detect treatment effects and the greater the statistical confidence that can be placed in the findings.  Having a larger sample size than all the other income maintenance experiments combined, SIME/DIME produced the results to which one could attach the gr

Given a will-defined treatment, an expected effect, and an expected cause-effect mechanism, the next step is to design an experiment that will clarify the cause-effect relationship.  Developing such a design is complex.  The basic aim, however, is straightforward; to introduce deliberate and systematic variations in the strength of the treatment