This paper documents changes in retirement saving patterns at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a large panel of U.S. tax data, including tens of millions of person-year observations, and measure retirement savings contributions and withdrawals. We use these data to document...

This paper estimates the saving effects of automatically enrolling employees in retirement plans, examining a large set of firms and incorporating savings responses beyond employer-sponsored plans. We construct an original data set - using tax returns, payroll filings, and retirement...

This paper estimates the saving effects of automatically enrolling employees in retirement plans, examining a large set of firms and incorporating savings responses beyond employer-sponsored plans. We construct an original data set − using tax returns, payroll filings, and retirement...

We study flows between retirement savings accounts from 2003 to 2015, providing the most comprehensive estimates to date of leakage from tax-preferred retirement savings accounts to pre-retirement age individuals. To do so, we create a nationally-representative panel of individuals using...

This paper investigates the effects of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) on residents of buildings qualifying for the credit. Specifically, it analyzes whether individuals who grow up in LIHTC housing are more likely to enroll in post-secondary education programs and have higher earnings...

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of...

Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to establish that for a recent cohort, 0.4% of retirement-age individuals abandoned an aggregate of $66 million, proxied...

Robert C. Pozen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Lucas W. Goodman is a research assistant for Pozen. The authors are grateful to Alan Auerbach, Ted Buerger, Marc Goldwein, Don Marron, Jim Poterba, Richard Skillman, Alvin Warren,...

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...