Most antipoverty policy in the United States focuses on families with children, but efforts to assist childless adults have gained traction in recent years. We examine the impact of the earned income tax credit on the labor force outcomes of childless adults using the age-25 eligibility discontinuity. We find no impacts on labor force participation and employment outcomes, which may be due to lack of information about the credit, lack of behavioral response due to its small size, or that childless adults already have very high labor force participation rates.
The Earned Income Tax Credit, a program designed to aid low-income households, and encourage work, lifts millions of families out of poverty every year. Given its' pro-work incentives, there has been droves of research analyzing the magnitude of employment effects, most of which has been focused around households with children. I focus on employment effects for an understudied population, childless adults, who have recently been the center of EITC expansion policy discussions. I use a difference-in-differences (DD) framework with Current Population Survey data to estimate the impact of expanding state EITCs on the employment of childless adults. Expanding state EITCs has led to significant increases in employment for childless women and small insignificant effects for childless men. A closer examination uncovers meaningful differences between men and women in the characteristics of marginal workers that future EITC expansions should take into account.
Past research suggests that only 1 percent of children born to unmarried teenage mothers are
placed for adoption. This low rate of adoption placement is surprising given the large possible
economic consequences of teenage childbearing. We document the economic consequences on
the four groups of people most directly affected by the decision to place the child for adoption:
the mother, the child, the future children of the mother, and the grandparents of the child. We
find that, on average, the combined lifetime economic benefit to these four groups from the
decision to place a child for adoption is well over a million dollars. While the decision to place a
child for adoption involves consideration of multiple social, family, and child factors, the results
in this paper suggest that policies that produce even a small increase in the fraction of unmarried
teenage mothers placing their child for adoption could produce very large social returns.
Works in Progress
”Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit for Childless Adults: A Regression Discontinuity Approach: Evidence
using the SIPP” (with Jonathan Meer)
”Incidence of the Earned Income Tax Credit: Supply and Price Effects in the Durable Goods Market” (with
Riley Wilson, Carla Johnston, and Adam Roberts)
"Public Health Insurance, Health Status, and Retirement Decisions: Evidence using the CPS and Restricted MEPS Data" (with Laura Dague and Marguerite Burns)
"Earnings Trajectories of Low-Wage Workers: Evidence using SIPP Survey Data Linked to Administrative IRS/SSA Earnings Data" (with Jonathan Meer and Kyle Spears)
“The Impact of Innovation in Health Care: The Case of Hepatitis C Pharmaceutical Treatments.” (with Mark Duggan, Katherine Meckel, and Hui Ding).