Economic Response to a Guaranteed Annual Income: Experience from Canada and the United States
Abstract
This article reviews research from the five income-maintenance experiments in Canada and the United States. After sketching the historical and political context of the experiments, we compare their designs and discuss some important analytic difficulties. Our primary focus is the work-incentive issue, both nonstructural estimates of the experimental effects and elasticity estimates of structural labor-supply functions. We provide initial estimates of nonstructural and structural models for the Canadian experiment. We discuss more briefly some non-work-response findings associated with a guaranteed annual income and offer some personal comments on social experimentation and the policy process.
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Empirical evidence for the income effect of government cash transfers, such as the Mincome experiment, is sparse.
“Yet, the empirical evidence for the income effect of government cash transfers (such as the Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, in the 1970s) is sparse (Hum and Simpson 1993).”
From Public Policy in a Time of Crisis: A Framework for Evaluating Canada’s COVID-19 Income Support Programs (2021) · cites this paper as Hum and Simpson 1993
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Koebel, K., Pohler, D., Gomez, R., & Mohan, A. (2021) · Canadian Public Policy · doi:10.3138/cpp.2020-117 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
- Authors
- Hum, D., & Simpson, W.
- Venue
- Journal of Labor Economics
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1993-01
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1, Part 2
- Pages
- S263-S296
- ISSN
- 0734-306X (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5307
- OpenAlex
- W2013291500
- Cited by
- 122
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 0.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Labor Economics (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Social Policy and Reform Studies
- Keywords
- guaranteed annual income, income support, work incentives, labor supply elasticity, social experiment, policy process, Canada, United States
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