Robert A. Moffitt - Böcker

Few government programs in the United States are as controversial as those designed to help the poor. From tax credits to medical assistance, the size and structure of the American safety net is an issue of constant debate. These two volumes update the earlier Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States with a discussion of the many changes in means-tested government programs and the results of new research over the past decade. While some programs that that experienced falling outlays in the years prior to the previous volume have remained at low levels of expenditure, many others have grown, including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and subsidized housing programs. For each program, the contributors describe its origins and goals, summarize its history and current rules, and discuss recipients' characteristics and the types of benefits they receive. This is an invaluable reference for researchers and policy makers that features detailed analyses of many of the most important transfer programs in the United States.

This volume presents five new studies on current topics in taxation and government spending.  Mark Shepard, Katherine Baicker, and Jonathan Skinner explore implementation aspects of a Medicare-for-All program, which provides a uniform health insurance benefit to everyone, and contrast it with a program providing a basic benefit that can be supplemented voluntarily. John Beshears, James Choi, Mark Iwry, David John, David Laibson, and Brigitte Madrian examine the design and feasibility of firm-sponsored “rainy day funds,” short-term savings accounts for employees that can be used when faced with temporary periods of high expenditure. Robert Barro and Brian Wheaton investigate the impact of taxation on choice of corporate form, on the formation and legal structure of new businesses, and indirectly on productivity in the economy. Jonathan Meer and Benjamin Priday examine the impact of the 2017 federal income tax reform, which reduced marginal tax rates and the incentive for charitable giving, on such giving. Finally, Casey Mulligan analyzes the impact of the Affordable Care Act on whether firms employ fewer than 50 employees, the employment threshold below which they are exempt from the requirement to provide health insurance to their employees.

This volume presents six new studies on current topics in taxation and government spending. The first study looks at the costs of income tax filing, which have risen over time because of the numerous tax forms families have to fill out when filing their taxes and because of increased costs of itemizing deductions, and explores ways to simplify filing and reduce those costs. The second study investigates the design of income tax schedules when there is uncertainty about the way taxation affects household behavior. The third study provides new and comprehensive estimates of the impact of the US Earned Income Tax Credit on the employment of low-income men and women, finding that the large majority of the various expansions of that credit over the last forty years have increased employment of single mothers. The fourth study reviews the structure of business taxation in China and describes a number of tax distortions and potential inefficiencies in the system. The next paper considers how the Affordable Care Act has affected the health insurance and labor market choices of individuals who are between the ages of 60 and 64, and it finds increases in insurance coverage and reductions in employment for some groups. The last study considers how reimbursement rates for health care providers under various government insurance programs affect providers’ willingness to take on new patients and expand their patient capacity.

This volume presents five new studies on current topics in taxation and government spending.  Natasha Sarin, Lawrence Summers, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick study how investors respond to taxes on capital gains, whether their incentives to invest are affected by those taxes, and whether that responsiveness has changed over time. Ethan Rouen, Suresh Nallareddy, and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato revisit the question of whether cuts to corporate taxes increase income inequality, bringing new data and new statistical techniques to generate fresh findings. Alan Auerbach and William Gale investigate whether the advantages and disadvantages of different types of taxation are affected when interest rates stay low for long periods, as has been the case in the U.S. for many years. Nora Gordon and Sarah Reber study the distributional impact of emergency subsidies to schools made by the federal government during the recent COVID pandemic and whether those subsidies were sufficient to cover the increased school costs induced by the pandemic. Jacob Goldin, Elaine Maag, and Katherine Michelmore investigate the fiscal cost of an expansion of the U.S. child tax credit, which has been discussed extensively in policy circles recently. They take into account not only the direct expenditure on the allowance but how cost is affected by the existence of work incentives and by possible beneficial effects on childrens’ adult earnings.

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy.Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest.This volume of Tax Policy and the Economy presents new research on important issues concerning US taxation and transfers. First, Edward L. Glaeser, Caitlin S. Gorback, and James M. Poterba examine the distribution of burdens associated with taxes on transportation. Replacing the gasoline tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax would increase the burden on higher-income households, who drive more fuel-efficient cars and are more likely to own electric vehicles. User charges for airports, subways, and commuter rail are progressive, while the burden of bus fees is larger for lower-income households than for their higher-income counterparts. Next, Katarzyna Bilicka, Michael Devereux, and Irem Güçeri investigate tax shifting by multinational companies (MNCs) and the implications of a potential Global Minimum Tax (GMT). They find that MNCs shift intellectual property to tax havens, and that a large share of patenting activity takes place in tax havens where little or no R&D occurs. Tax havens are particularly important for MNCs with large subsidiary networks; such firms would likely be subject to a GMT. Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston study the role of experience rating in the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and find that the current structure stabilizes the labor market because it penalizes firms with high rates of UI-eligible layoffs. In the fourth paper, David Altig, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Victor Yifan Ye calculate how retiring at different ages will affect Social Security benefit amounts, taking into account taxation and other benefits. They find that virtually all individuals aged 45 to 62 should wait until age 65 or later to maximize their Social Security benefits. Indeed, 90 percent would benefit from waiting until age 70, but only 10 percent do so. Finally, Jonathan Meer and Joshua Witter examine the potential impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on the labor force decisions of childless adults who are eligible for a small credit after they reach age 25. Comparing labor force attachment changes just before and after this age suggests that the EITC has little impact on the labor force participation of this group.

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy.Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest.This volume presents new research on taxation and public expenditure programs, with particular focus on how they affect economic behavior. John Guyton, Kara Leibel, Dayanand Manoli, Ankur Patel, Mark Payne, and Brenda Schafer study the disallowance of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefits as a result of IRS audits, and find that in post-audit years, audited taxpayers are less likely than similar non-audited taxpayers to claim EITC benefits. Janet Holtzblatt, Swati Joshi, Nora Cahill, and William Gale provide new empirical evidence on racial differences in the income tax penalty, or bonus, associated with a couple being married. Haichao Fan, Yu Liu, Nancy Qian, and Jaya Wen evaluate how computerizing value-added tax transactions in China affected the tax revenue collected from large manufacturing firms. Niels Johannesen, Daniel Reck, Max Risch, Joel Slemrod, John Guyton, and Patrick Langetieg study data on the ownership of foreign bank accounts and other financial accounts as reported on income tax returns. They find that many of these accounts are in tax havens, and they discuss the impact of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act on tax compliance and government revenue. Louis Kaplow integrates charitable giving into an optimal income tax framework, and shows that the externalities associated with such giving are key to determining its optimal tax treatment. Finally, Roger Gordon compares caps or quantity targets on emissions with carbon taxes and points out that which one dominates can be situation-specific and depend on a number of features of the economy.

The design of welfare programs in an era of reform and devolution to the states must take into account the likely effects of programs on demographic behavior. In the past, most research on welfare has examined labor market issues, although there have also been some important evaluations of the effects of Aid to Families with Dependent Children on out-of-wedlock childbearing. Much less information is available on other issues equally central to the debate, including effects on abortion decisions, marriage and divorce, intrafamily relations, household formation, and living arrangements. This book of papers contains reviews and syntheses of existing evidence bearing on the demographic impacts of welfare and ideas for how to evaluate new state-level reforms.

The design of welfare programs in an era of reform and devolution to the states must take into account the likely effects of programs on demographic behavior. Most research on welfare in the past has examined labor market issues, although there have also been some important evaluations of the effects of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program on out-of-wedlock childbearing. Much less information is available on other issues equally central to the debate, including effects on abortion decisions, marriage and divorce, intrafamily relations, household formation, and living arrangements. This volume of papers contains reviews and syntheses of existing evidence bearing on the demographic impacts of welfare and ideas for how to evaluate new state-level reforms.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 fundamentally changed the nation's social welfare system, replacing a federal entitlement program for low-income families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with state-administered block grants, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. PRWORA furthered a trend started earlier in the decade under so called "waiver" programs-state experiments with different types of AFDC rules-toward devolution of design and control of social welfare programs from the federal government to the states. The legislation imposed several new, major requirements on state use of federal welfare funds but otherwise freed states to reconfigure their programs as they want. The underlying goal of the legislation is to decrease dependence on welfare and increase the self-sufficiency of poor families in the United States.In summer 1998, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council to convene a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs. The panel's overall charge is to study and make recommendations on the best strategies for evaluating the effects of PRWORA and other welfare reforms and to make recommendations on data needs for conducting useful evaluations. This interim report presents the panel's initial conclusions and recommendations. Given the short length of time the panel has been in existence, this report necessarily treats many issues in much less depth than they will be treated in the final report. The report has an immediate short-run goal of providing DHHS-ASPE with recommendations regarding some of its current projects, particularly those recently funded to study "welfare leavers"-former welfare recipients who have left the welfare rolls as part of the recent decline in welfare caseloads.

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices.With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.