Methodological Frontiers of Public Finance Field Experiments (Forum: Experiments in Public Economics‪)‬

INTRODUCTION An economics graduate student starting her dissertation today would do well to follow the example of Heather Ross and think big. After working in 1965 and 1966 as an intern with the President's Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Ross became interested in income maintenance policy, particularly in how the behavior of low-income people might respond to transfer payments. In 1966, Ross, then a visiting research fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote a paper entitled A Proposal for Demonstration of New Techniques in Income Maintenance, which was subsequently submitted to the Johnson Administration's anti-poverty agency, the Office for Economic Opportunity. The experiment that resulted from this proposal--the New Jersey Income Maintenance experiment--is generally considered to be the first large-scale social experiment ever conducted. Ross's thesis proposal instigated a project that cost over $30 million in 2006 dollars, and sparked a wave of large-scale experiments in health, housing, and welfare. (1)