Child Benefits in the U.S. Federal Income Tax

This paper examines changes in, and interactions between, the major components of the U.S. federal tax code that provide substantial child benefits, including stimulus payments that depend on children. The focus is on creating a measure of total child tax benefit by income level, tax filing status, number of children, and year. From this measure, we learn that child tax benefits have more than doubled in real terms since the early 1990s and that low-income families receive larger child tax benefits than high income families for a first or second child, while the reverse is true for a third or fourth child. This paper also provides a case study of a tax policy change that lacked the intended consequences due to interactions between the child-benefit components of the tax code. Finally, this paper considers a comparison of child tax benefits to estimates of the cost of raising children.

The Efficiency Cost of Child Tax Benefits

Families with children receive preferential treatment in the U.S. federal income tax. Over the past 15 years, the real value of child tax benefits approximately doubled reaching nearly $1,900 per child in 2006. This paper examines the efficiency cost of providing child tax benefits. A representative agent model is used to show how the efficiency cost of providing child tax benefits depends on labor supply and fertility elasticities. The model reveals that cross-price substitution effect for labor supply and children is of primary importance in calculating the efficiency cost. However, there are no estimates of this parameter in the literature. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to estimate this parameter. The estimated cross-price substitution effect implies that children and time spent outside of employment are complements. This implies that the full cost of providing child tax benefits is larger than the reported tax expenditure.fertility, income tax, child tax benefits, female labor supply

Fertility Response to the Tax Treatment of Children

One of the most commonly cited studies on the effect of child subsidies on fertility, Whittington, Alm, and Peters (1990), claimed a large positive effect of child tax benefits on fertility using time series methods. We revisit this question in light of recent increases in child tax benefits by replicating this earlier study and extending the analysis with an additional 20 years of data. We find that their results suffer from the spurious regression problem, and are not robust to differencing. We find evidence of a statistically significant fertility response to a change in the real value of child tax subsidies occurring with a one- to two-year lag, but a much smaller and statistically insignificant total effect after several years, suggesting that a change in the child tax subsidy most strongly affects the timing of births.fertility, income taxation, child tax benefits, personal exemption

Do Family Wealth Shocks Affect Fertility Choices? Evidence from the Housing Market Boom and Bust

While there is a great deal of literature focusing on the relationship between income and fertility, little is known about how wealth affects fertility decisions of the household. This paper fills this gap in the literature by investigating how changes in housing wealth affect fertility. In particular, we use the wealth variation supplied by the recent housing boom and bust to generate exogenous variation in household wealth. We first conduct a state-level aggregate analysis to investigate how the birth rate is related to housing prices using differences in the timing and size of the housing market boom and bust across different states over time. We then conduct an analysis using restricted-use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that allows us to track how women’s fertility behavior is related to individual-level housing price growth. The demographic and geographic controls in the PSID allow us to control extensively for any confounding effects driven by household selection across different cities or neighborhoods, and we find that for homeowners, a $10,000 increase in real housing wealth causes a 0.07 percent increase in fertility. We find little effects of MSA-level housing price growth on the fertility of renters, which supports our identification strategy. That increases in housing wealth are strongly associated with increases in fertility is consistent with some recent work showing a positive income effect on births, and our estimates are suggestive that the large recent variation in the housing market could have sizeable demographic effects that are driven by the positive effect of housing wealth on fertility.

How Costly is Welfare Stigma? Separating Psychological Costs from Time Costs

This paper empirically decomposes the costs of welfare participation using a model of labor supply and participation in multiple welfare programs. Prior estimates of the cost of welfare participation have not differentiated psychological costs, or stigma, from the effort required to become eligible and maintain eligibility (time costs). The relative size of these two costs has implications for policy. We find that psychological costs are at least as large as the time costs associated with participation in food assistance programs. In addition, we find that the incidence of psychological costs is inconsistent with these costs acting as an effective screening mechanism.Program Participation, Welfare Stigma, Labor Supply, Structural Estimation

Area-Universal Rectangular Layouts

A rectangular layout is a partition of a rectangle into a finite set of interior-disjoint rectangles. Rectangular layouts appear in various applications: as rectangular cartograms in cartography, as floorplans in building architecture and VLSI design, and as graph drawings. Often areas are associated with the rectangles of a rectangular layout and it might hence be desirable if one rectangular layout can represent several area assignments. A layout is area-universal if any assignment of areas to rectangles can be realized by a combinatorially equivalent rectangular layout. We identify a simple necessary and sufficient condition for a rectangular layout to be area-universal: a rectangular layout is area-universal if and only if it is one-sided. More generally, given any rectangular layout L and any assignment of areas to its regions, we show that there can be at most one layout (up to horizontal and vertical scaling) which is combinatorially equivalent to L and achieves a given area assignment. We also investigate similar questions for perimeter assignments. The adjacency requirements for the rectangles of a rectangular layout can be specified in various ways, most commonly via the dual graph of the layout. We show how to find an area-universal layout for a given set of adjacency requirements whenever such a layout exists.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figure

Who Benefits from a Minimum Wage Increase?

This paper addresses the question of how a minimum wage increase affects the wages of low-wage workers. Most studies assume that there is a simple mechanical increase in the wage for workers earning a wage between the old and the new minimum wage, with some studies allowing for spillovers to workers with wages just above this range. Rather than assume that the wages of these workers would have remained constant, this paper estimates how a minimum wage increase impacts a low-wage worker’s wage relative to the wage the worker would have if there had been no minimum wage increase. The method allows for the effect to depend not only on the initial wage of the worker, but also nonlinearly on the size of the minimum wage increase. Using Current Population Survey data from 2005 to 2008, a period with a large number of U.S. state-level minimum wage increases, this paper finds that low-wage workers who experience a small increase in the minimum wage tend to have lower wage growth than if there had been no minimum wage increase. A large increase to the minimum wage increases the wages of not only those workers who previously earned less than the new minimum wage, but also spill over to workers with moderately higher wages. Finally, this paper finds little evidence of heterogeneity in the effect by age, gender, income, and race

Do it Right or Not at All: A Longitudinal Evaluation of a Conflict Managment System Implementation

We analyzed an eight-year multi-source longitudinal data set that followed a healthcare system in the Eastern United States as it implemented a major conflict management initiative to encourage line managers to consistently perform Personal Management Interviews (or PMIs) with their employees. PMIs are interviews held between two individuals, designed to prevent or quickly resolve interpersonal problems before they escalate to formal grievances. This initiative provided us a unique opportunity to empirically test key predictions of Integrated Conflict Management System (or ICMS) theory. Analyzing survey and personnel file data from 5,449 individuals from 2003 to 2010, we found that employees whose managers provided high-quality interviews perceived significantly higher participative work climates and had lower turnover rates. However, retention was worse when managers provided poor-quality interviews than when they conducted no interviews at all. Together these findings highlight the critical role that line mangers play in the success of conflict management systems

Not Yet Dead: The Establishment and Regulation of Slavery by the Islamic State

The Islamic State is an organization at the nexus of modern slavery and terrorism. This article provides the first in-depth analysis of how it regulated slavery. With a consideration of gendered approaches, it applies multiple data sources to reveal a three-part assessment of the forms, establishment, and regulation of slavery from 2014 to 2017. Beginning with the August 2014 Sinjar massacre, it reveals the logistics of slavery through an innovative process entitled the Division and Regulation of Enslavement Framework. It concludes with a discussion on the domestic and international aspects of this crime, detailing recommendations for research and policy

Hydrogen Gas Production from the Injection of Nanoscale Zero-Valent Iron and Sodium Borohydride Solutions: Potential Effects Near Injection Wells

The injection of nano-scale zero-valent iron (nZVI) is a remediation technique for the treatment of organic and metal contamination in soil and groundwater. The hydrogen gas (H2) produced during the reaction of nZVI and excess sodium borohydride (NaBH4) used in nZVI synthesis with water can inhibit nZVI transport in the subsurface, potentially limiting solution delivery to the target contaminant zone. Laboratory experiments were completed in a thin flow cell using NaBH4 and nZVI solutions injected into watersaturated medium sands, in which local gas saturations were quantified using a light transmission technique to calculate H2 gas volumes. Hydraulic conductivity, under water-saturated and quasi-saturated conditions, after gas exsolution and throughout gas dissolution, was measured. The results showed that H2 gas volume produced as a result of the reaction of nZVI with water was more than the H2 gas volume produced by the selfhydrolysis of NaBH4 solution regardless of similar NaBH4 concentration used as excess during nZVI synthesis. Pools of H2 gas were formed after injecting nZVI prepared with excess 5 g/L NaBH4 or after injecting 5 g/L NaBH4 without nZVI. Gas accumulated predominantly in a vertical layer of coarse sand, illustrative of a sand pack surrounding an injection well. Lower hydraulic conductivity measurements were linked to higher gas saturations and further reductions were evident as a result of gas pool accumulation at the top of the flow cell. These results show that gas production during the application of nZVI is an important process that must be considered during remediation design and operation to ensure effective delivery to target zones