We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child's outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children...

A key policy question in evaluating social programs to address childhood poverty is how families receiving unconditional financial support would spend those funds. Economists have limited empirical evidence on this topic in the U.S. We provide causal estimates of financial and time investments...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

Families provide substantial care to older adults with functional limitations. Policies that incentivize work have the potential to reduce this valuable care. This study uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a simulated instrument approach to examine the consequences of increases in the...

We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current Population Survey microdata, we compare labor supply outcomes among households who qualify for varying relative...

Do high taxes cause superstars to work less? We test this hypothesis using complete data on Hollywood movie stars' labor supply from 1927 to 2014. Changes to marginal tax rates in high tax brackets have no significant effect on the number of films a movie star makes each year. However, in years...

The largest tax-based social welfare programs in the US limit their benefits to taxpayers with labor market income. Eliminating these work requirements would better target transfers to the neediest families but risks attenuating tax-based incentives to work. We study changes in labor force...

The standard static labor supply model ignores that it takes time for individuals to adjust to a taxbenefit reform. A labor supply decision model is developed that allows for lagged responses in terms of state dependence, stemming from preferences, labor market constraints and adjustment costs....

The inequality in pre-tax income increases in Norway in the 1990s, while the distribution of taxes is about unaltered. This means that tax progressivity has decreased in the period, as measured by summary indices of tax progressivity. This paper discusses to what extent this observed decrease in...

Given that structural labor supply models continue to play a key role in the process of policy design, it is important to validate their capacity to provide reasonable predictions of alternative hypothetical policy options. Comparing outcomes before and after a realized policy change (such as a...