Tax-Based Marriage Incentives in the Affordable Care Act

Elliott Isaac and Haibin Jiang

National Tax Journal, 2025, vol. 78, issue 2, 369 - 413

Abstract: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced a premium tax credit to help low-income families purchase insurance and an individual mandate penalty to encourage purchasing insurance, but a couple’s total tax credit and mandate penalty may differ depending on whether they are married. We use an instrumental variables approach to estimate couples’ marriage responses to the ACA by leveraging variation created by the premium tax credit, individual mandate, Medicaid expansion, and the “family glitch.” We estimate a significant though small positive marriage response to the marriage subsidy and a larger negative response to the family glitch.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734569 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734569 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:nattax:doi:10.1086/734569

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in National Tax Journal from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().