Serving Americans Well: Removing Bureaucracy to Help Americans Access Tax Credits

While tax credits can be incredibly effective at helping families afford basic needs and lifting working families out of poverty, the process of claiming them is difficult and confusing for many low- and middle-income families. Even among savvy tax filers, confusion is common. Additional barriers pervade the system for very low-income families, making it difficult for the people who need tax credits the most to get them. The IRS has made progress towards a simpler process, however much more needs to be done to ensure all Americans are served well by our tax filing system. While this issue has sadly become a political football, at root it is simply a matter of making our government work better for taxpayers. Simplifying eligibility for tax credits and removing extra bureaucracy in the process would immediately reduce childhood poverty and material hardship and translate to various long-term positive outcomes for families and society at large. Based on lessons learned from three years of work helping thousands of families in Illinois access their stimulus checks and Child Tax Credits, this paper translates the experiences of hard-working families into a series of policy recommendations from the Chicago team

Does Frequency or Amount Matter? Testing the Perceptions of Four Universal Basic Income Proposals

The concept of universal basic income (UBI) first gained traction in the United States in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and again recently due to the 2008 recession and COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the idea lags in popularity in comparison to existing cash transfer policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit and COVID relief packages. We hypothesize that this disparity is related to predicted uses of a UBI in comparison annual or lump sum cash programs. In this survey of 837 American Amazon MTurk workers, we explore whether predicted behavioral responses to four randomly assigned hypothetical cash transfer scenarios vary across the domains of amount and frequency. We find that respondents are more likely to associate monthly payments with work disincentives and lump-sum transfers with debt repayment. Implications for UBI advocates include the need to continue educating the public on the empirical associations between UBI, employment, and expenditures. This study was supported by funds from the Hayek Fund for Scholars

Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity and Sales

Variable schedules are now the norm for part-time workers in a variety of industries including retail, where schedules typically change every day and every week, with three to seven days' notice of the next week's schedule. In recent years, these scheduling practices have come under increasing scrutiny in state attorney general offices, state and local legislatures, and the media. In retail, unstable schedules for employees have been considered an inevitable outcome of stores' need for profitability. Operations researchers have found that matching labor to incoming traffic is a key driver of retail store profitability (Perdikaki et al., 2012). At the same time, social scientists have studied the deleterious effects of variable schedules on employee wellbeing (Henly & Lambert, 2014). What has been lacking is evidence that schedules in service-sector jobs can be improved in ways that benefit both employers and employees

The Role of the Earned Income Tax Credit in Family Economic Decision Making: Moving beyond an Individual Actor Model

In this mixed methods dissertation, I examine how definitions of family shape decisions to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which family members to include as dependents on the EITC application, and to whom in one’s family benefits are shared. EITC policy largely ignores family structures that include multi-generations, adult siblings, and adult children that may or may not live under one roof. This creates a misfit between EITC eligibility and the realities of family life for many, particularly for families of color due to historical and contemporary punitive and exclusionary policies, and socio-cultural and economic factors that shape family life. The study is informed by secondary analyses of survey data and in-depth interviews with thirty single women with children – primarily women of color - who receive the EITC. I use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate household living arrangements of EITC-eligible families. For the interviews, I recruited a sample of women in diverse living arrangements. Using the SIPP, I establish the centrality of extended family systems in EITC-eligible households. About forty percent of EITC-eligible single women with children share household living arrangements with at least one other adult. Most of these women are the financial head of household, with women of color disproportionately comprising these household types. Extended household living arrangements appear to provide differential economic support by race/ethnicity. My analyses suggest the current EITC structure is insufficient for addressing the economic and income poverty issues that single women encounter. Interview data revealed the importance of extended family in EITC allocation decisions. My analysis shows that many interviewees allocate a portion of their EITC to their adult children, mothers, and family caregivers – despite receiving no tax credit for doing so. For example, some respondents report giving lump sum payments to family members, typically their mothers, who provided regular childcare during the year. Respondents highlighted the social and economic value of the childcare in helping them participate in paid work, attend school, and have a balanced life. These dynamics were most prominent among the Black women interviewed, some of whom described a sense of indebtedness to their mothers that motivated them to give a portion of their EITC consistently for many years after their children were grown. I also provide evidence that the filing of taxes and allocation of the EITC is a site of negotiation and intergenerational support between parents and young adult children. Respondents described a negotiated and relational process with their young adult children around tax filing and how they viewed tax filing as a symbolic "mini-transition" within their child's broader transition to adulthood. My dissertation highlights the unique challenges that low-income single women with children, especially women of color, face as mothers. Though the EITC provides opportunity for parents to support an array of family members, it comes at the cost of fewer resources for themselves and their dependent children. I conclude by arguing that policy reform should account for structural inequalities and culturally meaningful expressions of family life

The role of neural impulse control mechanisms for dietary success in obesity

Deficits in impulse control are discussed as key mechanisms for major worldwide health problems such as drug addiction and obesity. For example, obese subjects have difficulty controlling their impulses to overeat when faced with food items. Here, we investigated the role of neural impulse control mechanisms for dietary success in middle-aged obese subjects. Specifically, we used a food-specific delayed gratification paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure eating-related impulse-control in middle-aged obese subjects just before they underwent a twelve-week low calorie diet. As expected, we found that subjects with higher behavioral impulse control subsequently lost more weight. Furthermore, brain activity before the diet in VMPFC and DLPFC correlates with subsequent weight loss. Additionally, a connectivity analysis revealed that stronger functional connectivity between these regions is associated with better dietary success and impulse control. Thus, the degree to which subjects can control their eating impulses might depend on the interplay between control regions (DLPFC) and regions signaling the reward of food (VMPFC). This could potentially constitute a general mechanism that also extends to other disorders such as drug addiction or alcohol abuse