Suchergebnisse

The Earned Income Tax Credit began in 1975 as a temporary program to return a portion of the Social Security taxes paid by lower-income taxpayers, and was made permanent in 1978. In the 1990s, the program because a major component of federal efforts to reduce poverty, and is now the largest anti-poverty entitlement program. This report contains information on eligibility for the program, credit amount, participation, interaction with other tax provisions, issues, compliance, and more as related to the Earned Income Tax Credit.

AbstractThis study examines the relationship between earned income tax credit (EITC) laws and crime. Using data from 1999–2017, a period with 73 state EITC changes, I evaluate the effects of state‐level EITCs on violent and property crime. Estimating difference‐in‐differences models, I find that higher EITCs are associated with significant reductions in violent crime, while not affecting property crimes. Introducing high state EITC is associated with a 10.0% reduction in violent crimes, which corresponds to 40 fewer crimes per 100,000 individuals. Event study estimates confirm the negative association between EITC generosity and violent crime.

As the number of overweight and obese Americans rises, it becomes increasingly clear that Americans need further incentives to stimulate lasting lifestyle changes. Tax incentives focused on exercise, which have been largely unexplored to this point, are an effective response to the growing obesity problem in the United States that would largely avoid the political opposition that tax policies focused on diet have encountered. In addition, they would also provide a more palatable solution for the taxpayer beneficiaries with a relatively low impact on government revenues. Viable tax incentives to encourage greater fitness include tax credits and sales tax breaks, or, alternatively, direct subsidies can be used to facilitate similar behavior. This Article posits that, from this menu of options, tax credits to encourage exercise stand to create the most lasting positive results. Further, it presents a proposed fitness tax credit usable by state, local, or national government bodies and demonstrates that the most effective way to garner support for a fitness-based tax credit in the United States is to couple the credit with a broader emphasis on healthier lifestyles and to emphasize its potential long-term revenue gains.

To what extent does a tax credit affect firms' R&D activity? What are the mechanisms? This paper examines the effect of R&D tax credits on firms' R&D expenditure by exploiting the variation across firms in the changes in the eligible tax credit rate between 2000 and 2003. Estimating the first-difference equation of the linear R&D model by panel GMM, we find the estimated coefficient of an interaction term between the eligible tax credit rate and the debt-to-asset ratio is positive and significant, indicating that the effect of tax credit is significantly larger for firms with relatively large outstanding debts. Conducting counterfactual experiments, we found that the aggregate R&D expenditure in 2003 would have been lower by 3.0-3.4 percent if there had been no tax credit reform in 2003, where 0.3-0.6 percent is attributable to the effect of financial constraint, and that the aggregate R&D expenditure would have been larger by 3.1-3.9 percent if there had been no cap on the amount of tax credits, where 0.3-0.8 percent is attributable to relaxing the financial constraint of firms with outstanding debts.