Low-income families with children receive large tax benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit, while high income taxpayers receive large tax benefits from dependent exemptions (whose value is greater to those in higher tax brackets). In contrast, middle-income parents receive substantially...

We provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then ask what factors û demographic, economic, or policy û account for the observed changes in poverty in the two nations and what role could policy play in reducing poverty? We find that...

This paper analyzes the effects of a large randomized field experiment, carried out with H&R Block, offering matching incentives for IRA contributions at the time of tax preparation. About 15,000 H&R Block clients, in 60 offices in predominantly low- and middle-income neighborhoods in St. Louis,...

Although Pay for Success (PFS) contracts have received widespread attention in the United States and abroad, there is nothing fundamentally new about governments paying for outcomes. Performance clauses in construction contracts are common, and the Department of Defense has procured services...

This paper analyzes the effects of a large randomized field experiment carried out with H&R Block, offering matching incentives for IRA contributions at the time of tax preparation. About 14,000 H&R Block clients, across 60 offices in predominantly low- and middle-income neighborhoods in St....

We examine the effects of moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods on the outcomes of teenage youth, a population often seen as most at risk from the adverse effects of such neighborhoods. The randomized design of the Moving To Opportunity demonstration allows us to compare groups of youth,...

We analyze a randomized experiment in which 14,000 tax filers in H&R Block offices in St. Louis received matches of zero, 20 percent, or 50 percent of IRA contributions. Take-up rates were 3 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively. Among contributors, contributions, excluding the match,...

We study adult economic and health outcomes in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, a randomized housing mobility experiment in which families living in high-poverty U.S. public housing projects in five cities were given vouchers to help them move to private housing units in...