Removing Welfare Traps: Employment Responses in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment

This paper provides evidence that replacing minimum unemployment benefits with a basic income of equal size has minor employment effects at best. We examine an experiment in Finland in which 2,000 benefit recipients were randomized to receive a monthly basic income. The experiment lowered participation tax rates by 23 percentage points for full-time employment. Despite the considerable increase in work incentives, days in employment remained...