Because the tax savings of having a child are realized only if the birth takes place before midnight, January 1, the incentives for the ''marginal'' birth are substantial. Using a sample of children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of December, rather than the first week of January, is positively correlated with tax benefits. We estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by $500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of December by 26.9 percent. Economists have paid considerable attention to the relationship between taxes and the timing of behavior. 1 There is evidence, for example, that taxes do not materially affect the magnitude of capital gains We thank Dhruv Bansal, Nirmala Desai, and Berry Campbell from the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky for invaluable discussions. We received helpful comments from

Government programs designed to provide income safety nets or to encourage work often restrict eligibility to families with children, in an attempt to keep the programs well targeted. One potentially unintended consequence of the design of these programs is that if they lower the costs associated with having children, economic theory suggests that they may encourage childbearing. This paper considers whether dramatically changing incentives in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) affect fertility rates in the United States. 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 that a positive fertility effect of the program for many eligible women, our baseline models show that expanding the credit produced only extremely small reductions in higher-order fertility among white women. We also find evidence that suggests changes in marriage patterns may be related to changing fertility rates. For example, higher levels of the EITC are associated with higher first birth rates among married women and lower first births among unmarried women. This may suggest that the EITC encouraged marriage among single women. ‡ Thanks to Gabrielle Chapman, Cristian Meghea and Karoline Mortenson for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to

No abstract

This feature contains short articles on topics that are currently on the agendas of policymakers, thus illustrating the role of economic analysis in illuminating current debates. Suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to C. Eugene Steuerle, c/o Journal of Economic Perspectives, The Urban

No abstract