James Ziliak, University of Kentucky, Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics; Director of the Center for Poverty Research; Executive Director of the Kentucky Federal Statistical Research Data Center.

Seminar Title: The Antipoverty Impact of the EITC: New Estimates from Survey and Administrative Tax Records

Abstract: 

Evaluations of the EITC, including its antipoverty effectiveness, are based on simulated EITC benefits using either the Census Bureau’s tax module or from external tax simulators such as the National Bureau of Economic Research’s TAXSIM or Jon Bakija’s model. Each simulator utilizes model-based assumptions on who is and who is not eligible for the EITC, and conditional on eligibility, assumes that participation is 100 percent. However, recent evidence suggests that take-up of the EITC is considerably less than 100 percent, and thus claims regarding the impact of the program on measures of poverty may be overstated. We use data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) linked to IRS tax data on the EITC to compare the distribution of EITC benefits from three tax simulation modules to administrative tax records. We find that significantly more actual EITC payments flow to childless tax units than predicted by the tax simulators, and to those whose family income places them well above official poverty thresholds. However, actual EITC payments appear to be target efficient at the individual tax unit level, whether correctly paid or not. We then compare the antipoverty impact of the EITC across the survey and administrative tax measures of EITC benefits. We find that in the full CPS ASEC the tax simulators overestimate the antipoverty effects of the EITC by about 1.8 million persons in a typical year. Restricting to a harmonized sample of filers, we find that the antipoverty estimates derived from the TAXSIM and Bakija models align more closely to actual EITC payments compared to the CPS, suggesting a discrepancy in assignment of tax filers between the tax simulators.