A boost in the paycheck: survey evidence on workers’ response to the 2011 payroll tax cuts

Grant Graziani, Wilbert van der Klaauw and Basit Zafar

No 592, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: This paper presents new survey evidence on workers? response to the 2011 payroll tax cuts. While workers intended to spend 10 to 18 percent of their tax-cut income, they reported actually spending 28 to 43 percent of the funds. This is higher than estimates from studies of recent tax cuts, and arguably a consequence of the design of the 2011 tax cuts. The shift to greater consumption than intended is largely unexplained by present-bias or unanticipated shocks, and is likely a consequence of mental accounting. We also use data from a complementary survey to understand the heterogeneous tax-cut response.

Keywords: Income tax; Consumption (Economics); Wages; Consumer behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr592.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr592.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:592

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().