Paid Work and Unpaid Caregiving under Guaranteed Income: Evidence from Georgia’s Pilot

• In Event: Work, Care Work, and Policy Design: Reimagining Labor Supports Across Contexts

Abstract

Background and Purpose: As guaranteed income (GI) gains traction in the U.S., debates continue to focus on labor market effects, often echoing concerns raised during the 1970s Negative Income Tax (NIT) experiments. In those trials, small reductions in labor supply—particularly among women—were often interpreted as disincentives to work, despite evidence that many women used the income to increase caregiving. In today’s context, shifting social norms and opportunity structures may lead to different time-use decisions. This study revisits the labor/care trade-off using data from In Her Hands (IHH), a GI pilot in Georgia that provides $850/month in unconditional cash to low-income Black women.

Methods: The IHH pilot employed a randomized controlled trial with assigned treatment and control groups. Participants completed demographic questionnaires at the application stage. The treatment group was surveyed at five time points: before receiving GI (Wave 0), and at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months (Waves 1-4). The control group was surveyed at Waves 2 and 4 only. Our analytic sample included Black women with children and household incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line at the application stage (N=599). We conducted three sets of analyses. First, we explored within-group trends (Analysis 1) by conducting paired t-tests that compared treatment group averages for paid labor and unpaid caregiving hours at Waves 1-4 against baseline (Wave 0). Second, we conducted t-tests (Analysis 2) to compare treatment and control groups’ average labor and caregiving hours at Waves 2 and 4. Finally, we conducted a factorial ANOVA to examine whether changes in paid work hours were associated with changes in unpaid caregiving hours across groups between Waves 2 and 4 (Analysis 3). Inverse probability weighting, based on application-stage demographics, adjusted for baseline differences in Analyses 2 and 3.

Results: Analysis 1 found that participants in the treatment group significantly increased paid work hours at Wave 3 (t = 2.37, p < 0.05) and Wave 4 (t = 3.13, p < 0.01), while caregiving hours decreased across all waves. In Analysis 2, the treatment group reported fewer paid work hours than the control group at Wave 2 (t = -2.45, p < 0.05), but this difference disappeared by Wave 4. Analysis 3 showed no significant differences between treatment and control groups in caregiving hour changes based on paid labor hour shifts.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings challenge assumptions that GI reduces labor force participation. Instead, the data show stable or increasing paid work engagement and reductions in caregiving that may reflect broader time reallocations. Compared to the 1970s, when women used GI to increase caregiving, exploratory analyses suggest that recipients may be investing in long-term capacity building through education or skill development. These shifts signal the emergence of evolving forms of economic agency among low-income women, whose time use reflects not only their survival needs but also their future aspirations. Policymakers and researchers must move beyond binary employment measures and adopt more comprehensive frameworks to evaluate how GI affects well-being, mobility, and the broader distribution of labor.

Author

• Soobin Kim, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author