Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/JohnOHare

For nearly a decade, federal higher education subsidies have increasingly been delivered through the tax code rather than through direct spending programs such as grants, loan subsidies, and work study. This paper reviews the results of using new modules in the TRIM and Tax Policy Center microsimulation models to estimate the distributional impacts and expenditure and revenue effects of major federal higher education tax and spending policies. In addition, the paper reports estimates of the effects of some prototypical policy changes in the Pell Grant program as well as in the Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credits.

On April 15, 2000, more than 30 million taxpayers who itemized deductions on their tax returns were able to claim tax deductions for any contributions made to their favorite charities. The effect of the deduction was to lower the taxpayer’s cost of giving one dollar by amounts ranging from 15 cents to almost 40 cents. But many taxpayers who contribute to charities were not eligible for a charitable deduction because they claimed the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions on their tax returns.

Policymakers need to understand how Social Security reforms affect income distribution. Existing models range from simple representations of career earnings of typical workers to complex general equilibrium models. Population micro-simulation models, which project the earnings, wealth, and demographic histories of a representative sample of families, are useful for simulating many reform proposals. This report evaluates one such model - the projected cohorts model - and then discusses in detail three important issues in model development: 1) representing saving behavior, 2) capturing macro-economic effects, and 3) accounting for risk and uncertainty.

The Division of Policy Evaluation (DPE) at the Social Security Administration (SSA) is developing a model to evaluate the distributional effects of Social Security policy changes. The model is referred to as Modeling Income in the Near Term, or MINT. This technical report describes the results of development work on the MINT model performed under contract to SSA by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. The report discusses the methods used to project future incomes, presents regression results for equations explaining the path of different sources of income, and displays tables that summarize the results of projections. It discusses how income in retirement is projected to change for younger cohorts, relative to birth cohorts retiring in the 1990s, and discusses the sources of projected changes in the distribution of income of retirees.

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