IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32571.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Effects of the Expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for Childless Young Adults on Material Wellbeing

Author

Listed:
  • Jiwan Lee
  • Katherine Michelmore
  • Natasha Pilkauskas
  • Christopher Wimer

Abstract

In 2021, the U.S. Congress temporarily expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without a qualifying child (childless EITC), to help counteract the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on lower-wage working adults. This expansion roughly tripled the maximum benefits for qualifying filers and lowered the minimum age to claim the credit from 25 to 19, providing new benefits to low-income young adults. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey and a difference-in-differences design, this study is among the first to examine the impact of the expanded childless EITC on young adults’ material hardship (food, housing, and expenses). We find that the temporary expansion led to a significant decrease in housing hardship among low-income, childless, young adults, and suggestive evidence that it also reduced food insufficiency and difficulty with expenses. Overall our findings show that the temporary expansion of the childless EITC helped reduce material hardship among young adults.

Suggested Citation

  • Jiwan Lee & Katherine Michelmore & Natasha Pilkauskas & Christopher Wimer, 2024. "Effects of the Expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for Childless Young Adults on Material Wellbeing," NBER Working Papers 32571, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32571
    Note: CH PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32571.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • J08 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics Policies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32571. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.