Work Requirements and Child Tax Benefits

Jacob Goldin, Tatiana Homonoff, Neel A. Lal, Ithai Lurie, Katherine Michelmore and Matthew Unrath

No 32343, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many U.S. safety-net programs condition benefit eligibility on work. Eliminating work requirements would better target benefits to the neediest families but attenuates pro-work incentives. Using administrative records, we study how expanding a California child tax credit to non-workers affected maternal labor supply. We rely on quasi-random birth-timing and a novel method for using placebo analyses to maximize estimator precision. Eliminating the work requirement caused very few mothers to exit the labor force; our 95% confidence interval excludes reductions over one-third of one percent. Our results suggest expanding tax benefits to the lowest-income families need not meaningfully reduce workforce participation.

JEL-codes: H24 I38 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
Note: CH LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32343.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:32343

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32343

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().