Long-Term Follow-Up of Individual Development Accounts: Evidence From the ADD Experiment

This report presents findings from the fourth wave of the American Dream Demonstration (ADD) experimental study of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). The ADD was a set of 14 privately funded local IDA programs initiated in the late 1990s. It was the first large-scale test of IDAs in the United States and used a variety of research methods in order to learn about IDAs. One of these programs, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was implemented as a random assignment experiment. The purpose of the fourth wave of data collection (ADD4) was to assess the impact of short-term IDAs 10 years after random assignment (6 years after the program ended).

To accomplish this, an additional survey was conducted among the individuals who participated in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, randomized IDA experiment. Combining the new survey data with earlier surveys of the same individuals made possible rigorous statistical analysis of the effects of IDAs on program participants 6 years after the program ended.