Jacob Goldin

We study the optimal taxation of expenditures that generate income while also serving a consumption function. We characterize the Pareto optimal income tax deduction for such mixed-purpose expenditures within a generalized Atkinson-Stiglitz model. Pareto optimality requires a partial deduction for...

Tax benefits tied to children form a central component of the social safety net in the United States. To participate in these programs, taxpayers must claim a child on their tax return. We study the claiming of children on tax returns by drawing on health insurance information returns to establish...

Measuring average differences in an outcome across racial or ethnic groups is a crucial first step for equity assessments, but researchers often lack access to data on individuals races and ethnicities to calculate them. A common solution is to impute the missing race or ethnicity labels using...

The effect of a treatment may depend on the intensity with which it is administered. We study identification of ordered treatment effects with a binary instrument, focusing on the effect of moving from the treatments minimum to maximum intensity. With arbitrary heterogeneity across units, standard...

The estimation of racial disparities in various fields is often hampered by the lack of individual-level racial information. In many cases, the law prohibits the collection of such information to prevent direct racial discrimination. As a result, analysts have frequently adopted Bayesian Improved...

Many U.S. safety-net programs condition benefit eligibility on work. Eliminating work requirements would better target benefits to the neediest families but attenuates pro-work incentives. Using administrative records, we study how expanding a California child tax credit to non-workers affected...

Measuring average differences in an outcome across racial or ethnic groups is a crucial first step for equity assessments, but researchers often lack access to data on individuals races and ethnicities to calculate them. A common solution is to impute the missing race or ethnicity labels using...

Recent proposals to expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are at the center of current policy discussions in the United States. We study the fiscal cost of three such proposals that would expand refundability of the credit to low-income children, increase the maximum credit amount, and/or eliminate the...

Recent proposals to expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are at the center of current policy discussions in the United States. We study the fiscal cost of three such proposals that would expand refundability of the credit to low-income children, increase the maximum credit amount, and/or eliminate the...

Governments and non-profits devote substantial resources to increasing take-up of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) through educational outreach. We study a different approach: policies that encourage tax filing. In a large field experiment, we find that IRS letters about free tax preparation...

Many safety-net programs issue benefits as monthly lump-sum payments. We investigate how the timing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit issuance affects food purchases and the incidence of the transfer. Using retail scanner data from a large sample of grocery stores and state...

In recent years, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) has provided a cash transfer of up to $2,000 per child under age 17 to millions of families in the United States. Using the Current Population Survey, we examine the aggregate effects and distributional implications of the rules governing the credit. We...

Deciding how much to save for retirement can be complicated. Drawing on a field experiment conducted with the Department of Defense, we study whether such complexity depresses participation in an employer-sponsored retirement saving plan. We find that simplifying one dimension of the enrollment...

In 2015, five percent of households that filed tax returns paid a penalty for having at least one family member without health insurance as required by the Affordable Care Act. The tax penalty was intended to provide an incentive for purchasing insurance, but the incentive could have been muted if...

We evaluate a randomized pilot study in which the IRS sent informational letters to 3.9 million taxpayers who paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on administrative data, we study the effect of the intervention on taxpayers subsequent health...

In many settings, decision-makers' behavior is observed to vary based on seemingly arbitrary factors. Such framing effects cast doubt on the welfare conclusions drawn from revealed preference analysis. We relax the assumptions underlying that approach to accommodate settings in which framing effects...

Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial, but little is known about the impact of pre-trial detention on defendants. This paper uses the detention tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to estimate the causal effects of pre-trial...