The federal income tax and major welfare programs do not take into account significant cost-of-living variations among regions. This article considers what adjustments might be appropriate in light of the distributive purposes of tax and welfare systems and concerns about the efficiency of the...

A notable feature and principal virtue of Tax by Design is its system-wide perspective on different elements of the tax system. This review essay builds on this trait and offers a more explicit foundation for the report's general approach, drawing on a distribution-neutral methodology that is...

This paper examines the influence of educational debt aversion on the career choice of law school students, including the decision to attend law school and the decision to work in public interest law. To isolate the role of debt aversion, I analyze experimental data from NYU Law School%u2019s...

Myopia is increasingly believed to be a significant determinant of behavior and also plays a central role in justifications for social security and policies toward the taxation of capital. It is important, however, to account for labor supply effects, particularly in light of the preexisting...

Substantial evidence suggests that savings behavior may depart from neoclassical optimization. This article examines the implications of raising the savings rate - whether through social security, retirement plans, or otherwise - for labor supply, where labor supply is determined by behavioral...

A central justification for social insurance and for other policies aimed at retirement savings is that individuals may fail to make adequate provision during their working years. Much research has focused on myopia and other behavioral limitations. Yet little attention has been devoted to how...

We investigate the effects of broad-based work incentives on female crime by exploiting the welfare reform legislation of the 1990s, which dramatically increased employment among women at risk for relying on cash assistance. We find that welfare reform decreased female property crime arrests by...

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. Income may improve child outcomes through two mechanisms. First, income may improve development outcomes if it improves a family’s ability to purchase direct inputs into child...

In this paper, we exploit a cohort discontinuity in the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to obtain causal estimates of the effects of decreased generosity of disability insurance (DI) on behavior of existing DI recipients. We find evidence of substantial "social support...

This paper measures the causal effect of time out of the labor force on subsequent employment of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants and distinguishes it from the discouragement effect of receiving disability benefits. Using a unique Social Security Administration workload...