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70 Tax L. Rev. 439 (2016-2017)
Do Notices Have Permanent Effects on Benefit Take-up

handle is hein.journals/taxlr70 and id is 459 raw text is: Do Notices Have Permanent Effects on Benefit Take-Up? DAY MANOLI* NICK TURNER** I. INTRODUCTION Do informational interventions create short-lived effects or perma- nent effects? The answer to this question has important implications for theories of incomplete take-up of social benefit programs and for interpreting the impacts of outreach efforts in a variety of contexts.' Many studies examine short-term effects of informational interven- tions,2 but few consider the longer-term effects. In this Article, we examine both short-term and longer-term effects of outreach by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS sends notices to all taxpayers who appear eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) but who fail * Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Texas-Austin and National Bureau of Economic Research. ** Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Department of Treasury. This research represents our private research efforts and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the U.S. Treasury. We are thankful for helpful comments from seminar participants in the NBER Public Economics Meeting and at the U.S. Treasury. We also benefitted from insightful comments from John Friedman, Laura Kawano, Janet McCubbin, Ankur Patel, and Melissa Vigil. We thank Randeep Kaur for excellent research assistance. I Janet Currie, The Take-Up of Social Benefits, in Public Policy and the Income Distri- bution 80-82 (Alan J. Auerbach, David Card & John M. Quigley eds., 2006). 2 E.g., Eric P. Bettinger, Bridget Terry Long, Philip Oreopoulos & Lisa Sanbonmatsu, The Role of Application Assistance and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment, 127 Q.J. Econ. 1205 (2012); Benjamin L. Castleman & Lindsay C. Page, Freshman Year Financial Aid Nudges: An Experiment to Increase FAFSA Renewal and College Persistence, 51 J. Hum. Resources 389 (2016); Raj Chetty & Emmanuel Saez, Teaching the Tax Code: Earnings Responses to an Experiment with EITC Recipients, 5 Am. Econ. J.: Applied Econ., Jan. 2013, at 1; James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian & Andrew Metrick, Defined Contribution Pensions: Plan Rules, Participant Choices, and the Path of Least Resistance, 16 Tax Pol'y & Econ. 67 (2002); Brigitte C. Madrian & Dennis F. Shea, The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior, 116 Q.J. Econ. 1149 (2001); Richard H. Thaler & Shlomo Benartzi, Save More TomorrowTm: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Em- ployee Saving, 112 J. Pol. Econ. S164 (2004); Jeffrey R. Brown, Arie Kapteyn & Olivia S. Mitchell, Framing Effects and Expected Social Security Claiming Behavior 24-25 (Nat'l Bureau Econ. Research, Working Paper No. 17018, 2011), www.nber.org/papers/wl7018; Caroline Hoxby & Sarah Turner, Expanding College Opportunities for High-Achieving, Low Income Students 38 (Stanford Inst. for Econ. Pol'y Research, Discussion Paper No. 12-014, 2013), http://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/12-014paper_6.pdf. 439 Imaged with the permission of Tax Law Review of New York University School of Law

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