Household Behavior and the Tax Reform Act of 1986
Household Behavior and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

Author: Jerry A. Hausman

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13:

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This paper evaluates the effects of the 1986 Tax Reform Act on household labor supply and savings. It describes the tax bill's effects on incentives to work and to save, and uses recent econometric estimates of labor supply and savings elasticities to describe the reform's impact on household behavior. Two factors lead us to conclude that the new law will have small aggregate effects. First, most households experience only small changes in their marginal tax rates. Forty-one percent of the taxpaying population will face marginal tax rates as high, or higher, under the new law as under the previous tax code. Only eleven percent of taxpayers receive marginal tax rate reductions of ten percentage points or more. Second, plausible estimates of both the labor supply and savings elasticities suggest that even for those households that receive rate reductions, behavioral changes will be small. Our analysis suggests that the tax reform will increase labor supply by about one percent, and slightly reduce private savings.

Labor Supply Response to the Earned Income Tax Credit
Labor Supply Response to the Earned Income Tax Credit

Author: Nada Eissa

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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In a series of major expansions starting in 1987, the earned income tax credit (EITC) has become a central part of the federal government's anti-poverty strategy. In this paper, we examine the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), which included an expansion of the EITC, on labor force participation and hours of work. The expansion of the credit affected an easily identifiable group, single women with children, but is predicted to have had no effect on another group, single women without children. Other features of TRA86, such as the increase in the value of dependent exemptions and the large increase in the standard deduction for head of household filers, are predicted by economic theory to have reinforced the impact of the EITC on the relative labor supply outcomes of single women with and without children. We therefore compare the change in labor supply of single women with children to the change in labor supply of single women without children. We find that between 1984-1986 and 1988-1989 single women with children increased their labor force participation by 1.4 percentage points (from a base of 73.1 percent) relative to single women without children. We explore a number of possible explanations for this finding and conclude that the 1987 expansion of the EITC and the other provisions of TRA86 are the most likely explanations. We find no effect of the EITC expansion on the hours of work of single women with children who were already in the labor force. Compared to other elements of the welfare system, the EITC appears to produce little distortion of work incentives.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Reform in the United States
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Reform in the United States

Author: Owen Evans

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 30

ISBN-13:

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This paper reviews the provisions and possible effects of the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986. The literature on the potential effects of tax reform on labor supply, household consumption and saving, and business fixed investment is surveyed, and a model of business fixed investment in the United States is developed. The major explanatory influence are real GNP and the cost of capital, with the latter related to interest rates, inflation, and tax variables. The model is used to provide estimates of the possible effects on business fixed investment of the taxation changes introduced with the Tax Reform Act.

Behavioral Responses to Tax Rates
Behavioral Responses to Tax Rates

Author: Martin S. Feldstein

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 12

ISBN-13:

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This paper uses the experience after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to examine how taxes affect three aspects of individual taxpayer behavior: labor supply, total taxable income, and capital gains. The substantial sensitivity of married women's labor supply implies that the efficiency of the tax system could be increased significantly by reducing the marginal tax rates of these women relative to their husbands' marginal tax rates. More generally, the sensitivity of taxable income to the net of tax share implies that lower marginal tax rates would involve much less revenue loss than is traditionally assumed and would bring a much more substantial reduction in the deadweight loss of the tax system. The sharp fall in the real value of realized capital gains since the 1986 rise in tax rates on capital gains confirms earlier research indicating the substantial sensitivity of capital gains realizations to tax rates. A comparison with projections by the Treasury and Congressional Budget Office made in 1988 shows that the current official model greatly understates the sensitivity of capital gains to tax rates

Taxes and Marriage
Taxes and Marriage

Author: Hector Chade

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This article analyzes the effects of differential tax treatment of married and single individuals in the United States on marriage formation and composition, divorce, and labor supply. We develop a marriage-market model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that is sufficiently rich to capture key elements of the problem under consideration. We then calibrate the model and use it to evaluate the quantitative effects of several tax reforms aimed at making the tax law neutral with respect to marital status. We find that these reforms (i) systematically increase the labor supply of married females, with changes ranging from 0.3 to 10.1 percent; (ii) have substantial effects on the correlation of spouses' incomes, which changes from 0.2 to values between 0.185 and 0.334; (iii) can lead to either an increase or decrease in the fraction of people married, with changes that range from 0.6 to 2.4 percent.