The earned income tax credit and fertility

Journal of Population Economics - Tập 22 - Trang 537-563 - 2007
Reagan Baughman1, Stacy Dickert-Conlin2
1Department of Economics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA
2Department of Economics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

Tóm tắt

Government programs designed to provide income safety nets often restrict eligibility to families with children, creating an unintended fertility incentive. This paper considers whether dramatically changing incentives in the earned income tax credit affect fertility rates in the USA. We use birth certificate data spanning the period 1990 to 1999 to test whether expansions in the credit influenced birthrate among targeted families. While economic theory would predict a positive fertility effect of the program for many eligible women, our results indicate that expanding the credit produced only extremely small reductions in higher order fertility among white women.

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Journal of Population Economics

Tập 22

537-563

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