Racial Disparities in the Income Tax Treatment of Marriage

The authors are affiliated with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC). Holtzblatt is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Joshi was a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution and is now a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Cahill was a senior research assistant at Brookings and is now attending the Harvard Kennedy School. Gale is the Miller Chair at Brookings and codirector of the TPC. The authors thank Arnold Ventures and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for financial support. This project was part of “Interrupting Structural Racism,” a project coordinated by Urban Institute’s Office of Race and Equity Research. For helpful guidance and comments, the authors thank Chitra Balakrishnan, Rekha Balu, Ian Berlin, Dorothy Brown, Claire Cusella, Elena Derby, Luisa Godinez-Puig, Robert Moffitt, Justyce Watson, and members of the TPC Racial Equity Strategic Planning Advisory Group. The authors extend a special thanks to Dan Feenberg for programming a two-earner deduction in TAXSIM for purposes of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.