Using Differences in Knowledge across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings
TLDR
This paper developed a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy's marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy.Abstract:
We develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy’s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy. We apply this method to characterize the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on earnings using administrative tax records covering all EITC-eligible …lers from 19962009. We begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the EITC schedule –the degree of “sharp bunching”at the exact income level that maximizes EITC refunds by individuals who report self-employment income. The degree of self-employed sharp bunching varies signi…cantlyread more
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The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects
Raj Chetty,Nathaniel Hendren +1 more
TL;DR: The authors show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up shape their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage patterns by studying more than seven million families who move across commuting zones and counties in the U.S. They distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by comparing the outcomes of siblings within families, studying moves triggered by displacement shocks, and exploiting sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles.
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Active vs. Passive Decisions and Crowd-Out in Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Denmark
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the effects of retirement savings policies on wealth accumulation depend on whether they change savings rates by active or passive choice, and conclude that automatic contributions are more effective at increasing savings rates than subsidies for three reasons: subsidies induce relatively few individuals to respond, they generate substantial crowd-out conditional on response, and they do not increase the savings of passive individuals, who are least prepared for retirement.
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The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs using 138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016 in the U.S using a dierence-in-dierences approach.
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Behavioral Economics and Public Policy: A Pragmatic Perspective †
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for improving empirical predictions and policy decisions, and discuss three ways in which behavioral economics can contribute to public policy.
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Psychological Frictions and the Incomplete Take-Up of Social Benefits: Evidence from an IRS Field Experiment
Saurabh Bhargava,Dayanand Manoli +1 more
TL;DR: The authors assess the influence of program confusion, informational complexity, and stigma by evaluating response to experimental mailings distributed to 35,050 tax filers who failed to claim $26 million despite an initial notice.
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Natural and Quasi- Experiments in Economics
Bruce D. Meyer,Bruce D. Meyer +1 more
TL;DR: The advantages of using research designs patterned after randomized experiments and how they can be improved are described and aids in judging the validity of inferences they draw are provided.
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Natural and Quasi- Experiments in Economics
TL;DR: The authors describes the advantages of these studies and suggests how they can be improved and also provides aids in judging the validity of inferences that they draw, such as multiple treatment and comparison groups and multiple preintervention or post-intervention observations.
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Indivisible labor, lotteries and equilibrium
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical and show that the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation.
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Cheating ourselves: The economics of tax evasion
TL;DR: Tax evasion has been extensively studied in the literature as discussed by the authors, with an emphasis on the U.S. income tax, and tax evasion is a legal responsibility of citizens, with penalties attendant on noncompliance.
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Labor Supply Response to the Earned Income Tax Credit
TL;DR: In a series of major expansions starting in 1987, the earned income tax credit (EITC) has become a central part of the federal government's anti-poverty strategy as discussed by the authors.