Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Social Security Number'
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Viewing papers 91 through 100 of 145
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Working PaperTax Preparers, Refund Anticipation Products, and EITC Noncompliance
December 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-10
This work examines whether the availability of tax refund anticipation products (either in the form of a loan or a temporary bank account) is associated with higher non-compliance rates for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Refund anticipation products are offered by tax preparers as a way for taxpayers to receive a refund faster or to have the tax preparation fee paid from the refund (or both). These products are, on average, costly for taxpayers compared with the average value of a refund, and they are often marketed to low-income taxpayers who may be liquidity constrained or unbanked. Both tax preparers and taxpayers have perverse incentives to use these products, and the temptation of a large refund (for the taxpayer) and added fees and interest (for the tax preparer) may induce erroneous claiming of credits. The paper examines the association between refund anticipation product use and the overpayment of EITC using tax records and survey data linked at the individual level. For taxpayers in the Current Population Survey Annual and Social Economic Supplement, EITC eligibility is estimated based on household characteristics and combined survey and administrative income information; the data include EITC credit receipt, the use of paid tax preparation or online filing, and the receipt of a refund anticipation product. Both the incorrect payment of EITC and the value of EITC overpayment are associated with preparer use, and to a lesser extent with the use of online filing, when compared with paper filing. Incorrect payment is exacerbated for preparer and online filing when a refund anticipation product is purchased. Finally, an exogenous price shock to the tax preparation industry occurred in 2010. This allows for separately identifying a 'preparer effect' on EITC noncompliance. The rate of incorrect payment and the dollar value of overpayment increased in the tax year of the shock for those using a preparer and buying a product.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCapturing More Than Poverty: School Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Data and Household Income
December 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-09
Educational researchers often use National School Lunch Program (NSLP) data as a proxy for student poverty. Under NSLP policy, students whose household income is less than 130 percent of the poverty line qualify for free lunch and students whose household income is between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty line qualify for reduced-price lunch. Linking school administrative records for all 8th graders in a California public school district to household-level IRS income tax data, we examine how well NSLP data capture student disadvantage. We find both that there is substantial disadvantage in household income not captured by NSLP category data, and that NSLP categories capture disadvantage on test scores above and beyond household income.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAir Quality, Human Capital Formation and the Long-term Effects of Environmental Inequality at Birth
May 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-05
A growing body of literature suggests that pollution exposure early in life can have substantial long term effects on an individual's economic well-being as an adult, however the mechanisms for these effects remain unclear. I contribute to this literature by examining the effect of pollution exposure on several intermediate determinants of adult wages using a unique linked dataset for a large sample of individuals from two cohorts: an older cohort born around the 1970, and a younger cohort born around 1990. This dataset links responses to the American Community Survey to SSA administrative data, the universe of IRS Form 1040 tax returns, pollution concentration data from EPA air quality monitors and satellite remote sensing observations. In both OLS and IV specifications, I find that pollution exposure at birth has a large and economically significant effect on college attendance among 19-22 year olds. Using conventional estimates of the college wage premium, these effects imply that a 10 'g/m3 decrease in particulate matter exposure at birth is associated with a $190 per year increase in annual wages. This effect is smaller than the wage effects in the previous literature, which suggests that human capital acquisition associated with cognitive skills cannot fully explain the long term wage effects of pollution exposure. Indeed, I find evidence for an additional channel working through non-cognitive skill -pollution exposure at birth increases high school non-completion and incarceration among 16-24 year olds, and that these effects are concentrated within disadvantaged communities, with larger effects for non-whites and children of poor parents. I also find that pollution exposure during adolescence has statistically significant effects on high school non-completion and incarceration, but no effect on college attendance. These results suggest that the long term effects of pollution exposure on economic well-being may run through multiple channels, of which both non-cognitive skills and cognitive skills may play a role.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLongitudinal Environmental Inequality and Environmental Gentrification: Who Gains From Cleaner Air?
May 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-04
A vast empirical literature has convincingly shown that there is pervasive cross-sectional inequality in exposure to environmental hazards. However, less is known about how these inequalities have been evolving over time. I fill this gap by creating a new dataset, which combines satellite data on ground-level concentrations of fine particulate matter with linked administrative and survey data. This linked dataset allows me to measure individual pollution exposure for over 100 million individuals in each year between 2000 and 2014, a period of time has seen substantial improvements in average air quality. This rich dataset can then be used to analyze longitudinal dimensions of environmental inequality by examining the distribution of changes in individual pollution exposure that underlie these aggregate improvements. I confirm previous findings that cross-sectional environmental inequality has been on the decline, but I argue that this may miss longitudinal patterns in exposure that are consistent with environmental gentrification. I find that advantaged individuals at the beginning of the sample experience larger pollution exposure reductions than do initially disadvantaged individuals.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperJust Passing Through: Characterizing U.S. Pass-Through Business Owners
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-69
We investigate the use of administrative data on the owners of partnerships and S-corporations to develop new statistics that characterize business owners. Income from these types of entities is "passed through" to owners to be taxed on the owners' tax returns. The information returns associated with such pass-through entities (Form K1 records) make it possible to link individual owners to the businesses they own. These linkages can be leveraged to associate measures of the demographic and human capital characteristics of business owners with the characteristics of the businesses they own. This paper describes measurement issues associated with administrative records on these pass-through entities and their integration with other Census data products. In addition, we document a number of interesting trends in business ownership among pass-through entities. We show a substantial decline in both entry and exit with less churn among both owners and owned businesses. We also show that the owners of pass-through entities are older, more likely to be male, and more likely to be white compared to the working population.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEarnings Inequality and Mobility Trends in the United States: Nationally Representative Estimates from Longitudinally Linked Employer-Employee Data
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-24
Using earnings data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper analyzes the role of the employer in explaining the rise in earnings inequality in the United States. We first establish a consistent frame of analysis appropriate for administrative data used to study earnings inequality. We show that the trends in earnings inequality in the administrative data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program are inconsistent with other data sources when we do not correct for the presence of misused SSNs. After this correction to the worker frame, we analyze how the earnings distribution has changed in the last decade. We present a decomposition of the year-to-year changes in the earnings distribution from 2004-2013. Even when simplifying these flows to movements between the bottom 20%, the middle 60% and the top 20% of the earnings distribution, about 20.5 million workers undergo a transition each year. Another 19.9 million move between employment and nonemployment. To understand the role of the firm in these transitions, we estimate a model for log earnings with additive fixed worker and firm effects using all jobs held by eligible workers from 2004-2013. We construct a composite log earnings firm component across all jobs for a worker in a given year and a non-firm component. We also construct a skill-type index. We show that, while the difference between working at a low-or middle-paying firm are relatively small, the gains from working at a top-paying firm are large. Specifically, the benefits of working for a high-paying firm are not only realized today, through higher earnings paid to the worker, but also persist through an increase in the probability of upward mobility. High-paying firms facilitate moving workers to the top of the earnings distribution and keeping them there.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRacial Disparity in an Era of Increasing Income Inequality
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-01
Using unique linked data, we examine income inequality and mobility across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data encompass the universe of tax filers in the U.S. for the period 2000 to 2014, matched with individual-level race and ethnicity information from multiple censuses and American Community Survey data. We document both income inequality and mobility trends over the period. We find significant stratification in terms of average incomes by race and ethnic group and distinct differences in within-group income inequality. The groups with the highest incomes - Whites and Asians - also have the highest levels of within-group inequality and the lowest levels of within-group mobility. The reverse is true for the lowest-income groups: Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have lower within-group inequality and immobility. On the other hand, our low-income groups are also highly immobile when looking at overall, rather than within-group, mobility. These same groups also have a higher probability of experiencing downward mobility compared with Whites and Asians. We also find that within-group income inequality increased for all groups between 2000 and 2014, and the increase was especially large for Whites. In regression analyses using individual-level panel data, we find persistent differences by race and ethnicity in incomes over time. We also examine young tax filers (ages 25-35) and investigate the long-term effects of local economic and racial residential segregation conditions at the start of their careers. We find persistent long-run effects of racial residential segregation at career entry on the incomes of certain groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of a rigid income structure, with mainly Whites and Asians confined to the top and Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics confined to the bottom.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperResponse Error & the Medicaid undercount in the CPS
December 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-11
The Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) is an important source for estimates of the uninsured population. Previous research has shown that survey estimates produce an undercount of beneficiaries compared to Medicaid enrollment records. We extend past work by examining the Medicaid undercount in the 2007-2011 CPS ASEC compared to enrollment data from the Medicaid Statistical Information System for calendar years 2006-2010. By linking individuals across datasets, we analyze two types of response error regarding Medicaid enrollment - false negative error and false positive error. We use regression analysis to identify factors associated with these two types of response error in the 2011 CPS ASEC. We find that the Medicaid undercount was between 22 and 31 percent from 2007 to 2011. In 2011, the false negative rate was 40 percent, and 27 percent of Medicaid reports in CPS ASEC were false positives. False negative error is associated with the duration of enrollment in Medicaid, enrollment in Medicare and private insurance, and Medicaid enrollment in the survey year. False positive error is associated with enrollment in Medicare and shared Medicaid coverage in the household. We discuss implications for survey reports of health insurance coverage and for estimating the uninsured population.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperLocal Labor Demand and Program Participation Dynamics
November 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-10
Estimates the effect of fluctuations in local labor conditions on the likelihood that existing participants are able to transition out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Our primary data are SNAP administrative records from New York (2007-2012) linked to the 2010 Census at the person-level. We further augment these data by linking to industry-specific labor market indicators at the county-level. We find that local labor markets matter for the length of time individuals spend on SNAP, but there is substantial heterogeneity in estimated effects across local industries. While employment growth in industries with small shares of SNAP participants has no impact on SNAP exits, growth in local industries with creases the likelihood that recipients exit the program. We also observe corresponding increases in entries when these industries experience localized contractions. Notably, estimated industry effects vary across race groups and parental status, with Black Alone non-Hispanic, Hispanic, and mothers benefiting the least from improvements in local labor market conditions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperDifferences in Self-employment Duration by Year of Entry & Pre-entry
November 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-09
Self-employment is associated with entrepreneurship and a motivation to pursue an opportunity. Previous research indicates that people also become self-employed because of limited opportunities in the wage sector. Using a unique set of data that links the American Community Survey to Form 1040 and W-2 records, this paper extends the existing literature by examining self-employment duration for five consecutive entry cohorts, including two cohorts who entered self-employment during the Great Recession. Severely limited labor market opportunities may have driven many in the recession cohorts to enter self-employment, while those entering self-employment during the boom may have been pursuing opportunities under favorable market conditions. To more explicitly test the concept of "necessity" versus "opportunity" self-employment, we also examine the pre-entry wage labor attachment of entrants. Specifically, we ask whether an association exists between wage labor attachment and the duration of self-employment. We also explore whether the demographic/socio-economic characteristics and self-employment exit behavior of the cohorts are different, and if so, how. We find evidence consistent with the existence of "necessity" vs. "opportunity" self-employment types.View Full Paper PDF
