Latest Urban Institute Reports

Using tax filing data, this fact sheet demonstrates dramatic behavioral differences among the banked and unbanked in their use of two at-times costly tax-time financial products, refund anticipation checks (RACs) and refund anticipation loans (RALs). Banked tax filers are much more likely to avoid such products. Even for those who are otherwise similar in income and background, the banked are 57 percent less likely to use a RAC and 83 percent less likely to use a RAL. Such evidence may suggest the need for broader strategies that encourage savings and target the asset side of the household balance sheet.

This Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded paper by Robert Berenson and Nicole Cafarella provides a status report on the Innovation Center's activities to date—including delineating the goals envisioned by Congress, detailing the new tools it was given, and emphasizing how the enhanced authority compares with CMS’s traditional demonstration programs. The paper describes the Center's major initiatives to date, including those that address primary care redesign, bundled payments, ACOs, dual-eligible beneficiaries, and the health care system's capacity for spreading innovative ideas. The authors note that some observers have expressed concern that the Innovation Center's fast-paced approach may be overwhelming to smaller delivery systems.

Amid much conversation about the future of Social Security, personal retirement savings are becoming more critical than ever before. Many employers contribute to their workers' retirement savings, but who benefits most from this and how much do these people lose in wages as a result of these contributions? Karen Smith, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute's Program on Retirement Policy, talks about employer contributions to retirement savings, who benefits most, and who loses the most wages in return for retirement contributions.

Many of the provisions to expand health coverage in the Affordable Care Act must be implemented by the states. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute is undertaking a comprehensive monitoring and tracking project to examine the implementation and effects of the ACA in ten of the states: Alabama, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Virginia. This first report is a case study analysis of Oregon’s efforts to advance health care reform. Derived from a site visit and extensive interviews with state officials and state stakeholders, it documents Oregon's considerable progress in establishing an exchange, implementing insurance reforms, and preparing for an expansion of Medicaid, all within a challenging fiscal environment.

Effective tax rates (ETRs) measure how much people pay in taxes as a percentage of their pretax incomes. That seems simple, but there’s an important complication: there are different ways to measure how much someone pays in taxes and how much he collects in pretax income. Those choices matter a great deal. As a result, it is essential to use the same ETR measure when comparing tax burdens across individual taxpayers or groups.

The lackluster economy, eroding traditional pensions, and volatile stock market suggest that baby boomers - those born between 1945 and 1965 - face increasingly uncertain retirements. Our projections show that lower - and moderate-income boomers will continue to rely on Social Security for most of their retirement income. While the projections reflect some good news - women will reap the rewards of working and earning more than previous generations - they also raise alarms. Between 30 and 40 percent of boomers will not have enough income at age 70 to replace 75 percent of their preretirement earnings, a common standard for measuring retirement income adequacy.

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

Tax expenditures on average raise after-tax incomes more for upper-income than for lower-income taxpayers. As a share of income, special rates for capital gains and dividends and itemized deductions provide the largest benefits for taxpayers in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, exemptions and exclusions benefit taxpayers in upper middle-income groups the most, and refundable credits provide the largest benefits to those in the bottom two quintiles of the distribution. Interactions among provisions make the revenue cost of all tax expenditures about 10 percent larger than the sum of the costs of the separate provisions.

The Urban Institute's MetroTrends research team has created an interactive report card on racial and ethnic equity in the nation's top 100 metropolitan areas. A brief commentary by Margery Austin Turner, the Institute's vice president for research, accompanies the map.

Low-income Medicare beneficiaries are eligible for subsidies to help them pay premiums and cost sharing. However, these subsidies fall short of those contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that help low-income families afford adequate health coverage. In this report we consider policy options to reform Medicare's low-income subsidies to better align with ACA provisions. We estimate that a significant simplification in low-income protection and cost-sharing rules could greatly reduce burdens on the poorest and sickest beneficiaries. Depending on how they are implemented, these reforms could either reduce or only modestly increase total public spending.