Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article is a Commentary on Bradley T. Heim (), The effect of recent tax changes on taxable income: Evidence from a new panel of tax returns," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 28, 147–163. doi:10.1002/pam.20406. This note provides corrected estimates of the elasticity of taxable income to the net of tax share using a panel of tax returns that follows a random sample of taxpayers from 1999 to 2005, spanning the EGTRRA 2001 and JGTRRA 2003 tax changes. Two errors were corrected: the specification of income splines, and the subtraction of capital gains income from the dependent variable. Though the original results are largely robust to the first change, they are not robust to the second. The corrected estimates suggest that the elasticity of taxable income to the current year's net of tax share is small and statistically insignificantly different from zero.

AbstractUnemployment Insurance (UI) benefits were a central part of the social safety net during the COVID‐19 recession. UI benefits, however, are severely understated in surveys. Using administrative tax data, we find that over half of UI benefits were missed in major survey data, with a greater understatement among low‐income workers. As a result, 2020 official poverty rates were overstated by about 2 percentage points, and corrected poverty reached a six‐decade low. We provide data to correct underreporting in surveys and show that, compared to UI benefits, the UI exclusion tax expenditure was less targeted at low incomes.