Tax Policy and the Economy

Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) are now a major source of charitable donations in the United States, responsible for 1 in 10 dollars donated to charity in 2015. In 2016, Fidelity Charitable, whose only mission is to provide DAFs, became the largest charity in the United States. Paradoxically, most people have never heard of DAFs or Fidelity Charitable. This leads us to ask, who uses DAFs and why, what is the impact of government tax policy toward DAFs, and could the extra fiscal cost of subsidizing DAFs be balanced out by an extra public gain of new charity resulting from tax policy toward DAFs?

Online postsecondary education is growing rapidly and increasingly dominates the use of the tax benefits for higher education: the American Opportunity Tax Credit, the Lifelong Learning Credit, and the Deduction for Tuition and Fees. Because online education does not closely resemble “brick-and-mortar” residential college education aimed at 18- to 23-year-olds, it presents new challenges and opportunities for administering the tax benefits for higher education. In this paper, I combine tax data with administrative data from the US Department of Education for cross-validation, to study compliance, and to gain understanding of how online schools and students use tax benefits for higher education. I also analyze take-up of the tax benefits and how they affect changes in earnings from before enrollment to after enrollment. The findings suggest several practical implications for the administration of the tax benefits, including form revisions, federal data coordination, and novel uses of earnings data to target compliance reviews.

A growing body of evidence suggests that psychological biases can lead different implementations of otherwise equivalent tax incentives to result in meaningfully different behaviors. We argue that in the presence of such failures of “implementation invariance,” decoupling the question of optimal feasible allocations from the tax system used to induce them—the “mechanism design approach” to tax analysis—cannot be the right approach to analyzing optimal tax systems. After reviewing the diverse psychologies that lead to failures of implementation invariance, we illustrate our argument by formally deriving three basic lessons that arise in the presence of these biases. First, the mechanism design approach neither estimates nor bounds the welfare computed under psychologically realistic assumptions about individuals’ responses to the tax instruments used in practice. Second, the optimal allocations from abstract mechanisms may not be implementable with concrete tax policies, and vice versa. Third, the integration of these biases may mitigate the importance of information asymmetries, resulting in optimal tax formulas more closely approximated by classical Ramsey results. We conclude by proposing that a “behavioral” extension of the “sufficient statistics” approach is a more fruitful way forward in the presence of such psychological biases.

We analyze potential reforms to Medicaid financing through the lens of fiscal federalism. Because substantial dollars are at stake, both the economic and political sides of intergovernmental transfers have high relevance in this setting. We show that changes in Medicaid financing formulas can shift amounts exceeding several hundred dollars per capita from “winning” states to “losing” states. In some cases, these amounts exceed 10% of states’ own-source revenues. States’ balanced budget requirements imply that such changes would, if not phased in gradually, require significant budgetary adjustment over short time horizons. We next show that alternative Medicaid financing structures have significant implications for states’ exposure to budgetary stress during recessions. During the Great Recession, an acyclical block-grant structure would have increased states’ shortfalls by 2–3.5% of own-source revenues relative to either an explicitly countercyclical block grant or the current matching system. Finally, we assess the implications of several financing structures for the extent to which they subsidize states’ decisions on both the “extensive” and “intensive” margins of coverage generosity over the short and long term.

Recent federal legislation has linked the price paid for health insurance benefits to current income. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, individuals and families with income as high as 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible for premium tax credits that limit their health insurance premiums to under 10% of their income. Under the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, higher-income beneficiaries face income-related premiums over three times the standard premium for Part B coverage. For workers at or near retirement age, means testing based on current income provides an incentive for early retirement, dissaving, and income manipulation, raising concerns about the efficiency of such means testing. Further, current income is subject to short-term fluctuations, making it a noisy predictor of ability to pay. Using the Health and Retirement Study and linked Social Security earnings histories, this paper introduces a measure of lifetime income that compares favorably to current income as a basis for means testing. It offers less short-term variation in premiums while improving incentives for preretirement work and saving.

We study the economic situation of disabled women and the role that taxes and transfers play in improving their economic circumstances, using 1968–2015 data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We begin by documenting the trends in point-in-time disability rates of women as well as estimating the prevalence of disability over a woman’s lifetime. We find that women are more likely than men to have experienced a disability through their midforties, but are less likely to have experienced a serious disability prior to retirement. The onset of disability for women is found to be associated with a fall in labor supply, family income, and consumption. The fall varies with the degree of disability but tends to be smaller than that of disabled men, particularly for family income and consumption. Transfers, particularly disability insurance and Supplemental Security Income, play a large role in cushioning the fall in income for disabled women. However, while the relative decline in income is smaller for women than men, a larger share of disabled women have very low absolute levels of income and consumption. Approximately half of the most disabled women receive food stamp/SNAP benefits, pointing to the greater relative importance of means-tested benefits rather than social insurance for this group.