EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

EITC Use in Shared Placement Cases

Hsueh-Hsiang Li, John Karl Scholz and Patricia R. Brown

Public Finance Review, 2018, vol. 46, issue 3, 327-358

Abstract: We use a unique data set containing information from state individual income tax returns, Wisconsin unemployment insurance wage data, and data collected by hand from Wisconsin courthouses to examine the earned income tax credit (EITC) usage by divorced men and women with children. We show that a large percentage of divorced adults with children file tax returns. Moreover, many receive the EITC benefit through the tax system, which results in substantial additional resources for the household. We find little evidence of divorced parents engaging in strategic allocations of their children to maximize EITC claims. We also find that many EITC-eligible low-income parents fail to claim it. A potentially cost-effective way to increase the resources available to low-income working families is to provide easy-to-understand information on child-related provisions in the tax code at the time the court order is established.

Keywords: earned income tax credit (EITC); poverty; divorce; child support (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pfr.sagepub.com/content/46/3/327.abstract (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:sae:pubfin:v:46:y:2018:i:3:p:327-358

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Finance Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:46:y:2018:i:3:p:327-358