A Reanalyis of Marital Stability in the Seattle-Denver Income-Maintenance Experiment

Abstract

This paper challenges the widely cited finding of Groeneveld, Hannan, and Tuma that the Seattle-Denver Income-Maintenance Experiment provides evidence that guaranteed income plans for poor husband-wife families will increase marital dissolution relative to the existing program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The reanalysis of the experimental data distinguishes between the experimental treatment in the form of the "pure" negative income tax and the treatment plans that involved an experimental training program. All the time periods of the experiment are used, with allowance for the timing of the marital dissolution in the inferences, and with allowance for attrition. The conclusion of this paper is that the plans (specifically, the negative income tax plans in the experiment) had no effect on the rate of marital dissolutions among the "treatment" couples relative to the control couples.