In this paper, we study tax loss asymmetry for S-corporation owners. We find that these owners use approximately 70 percent of losses contemporaneously---which exceeds the loss use over ten years for C corporations. We simulate owner-level effective tax rates and find that, in spite of the high...

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...

We consider the short-run responses of businesses and their owners to the introduction of Section 199A, a deduction implemented in 2018 that reduced the effective tax rate on pass-through business income. We study the deduction using several datasets derived from de-identified tax records of...

Rising student debt balances have captured the attention of policy makers and academics; however, the effect of student debt on individuals’ self-employment behavior is still unclear. In this paper, we estimate the association between student debt and self-employment using data from the Survey...

Each year Americans spend over two billion hours and $30 billion preparing individual tax returns, and these filing costs are regressive. To lower and redistribute the filing burden, some commentators have proposed having the IRS pre-populate tax returns for individuals. We evaluate this...

In August 2009 the Congressional Budget Offi ce warned that the budget was on an unsustainable path. Preventing federal debt from growing faster than the economy over the long-run requires large increases in revenues and/or decreases in spending. We explore, using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy...

In this paper, we study declines in women's labor force participation by race and ethnicity as well as the presence of children. We find that increases in labor force exits were larger for Black women, Latinas, and women living with children. In particular, we find larger increases in...

While American women's employment rates fall in the years after they have a child, their self-employment rates do not. These contrasting patterns may be explained by the fact that self-employed women often have more control over their work schedule, hours, and location than wage and salary...