Bradley T. Heim

Legal Enforcement and Corporate Behavior: An Analysis of Tax Aggressiveness after an Audit

We study how legal enforcement changes subsequent corporate behavior. Using confidential IRS data, we find that corporations increase their tax aggressiveness after an audit for a few years and then reduce it gradually. In the long run, audited corporations become more tax aggressive than before the audit, reducing their effective tax rate by around 14%. This finding is in contrast to the usual expectation that subjects should behave better after experiencing legal enforcement, at least for some time. We show that this U-shaped impact indicates a strategic calculation of firms, including Bayesian updating of audit risk. This adverse effect on illicit activities calls for reexamining both existing theory and current policy of legal enforcement.Contrary to common expectations, legal enforcement may increase subsequent corporate misbehavior. Using Internal Revenue Service and financial statement data, we find that corporations gradually increase their tax aggressiveness for a few years following an audit and then reduce it sharply. We show that this U-shaped impact is consistent with strategic responses on the part of firms and with Bayesian updating of audit risk. This adverse effect on corporate behavior calls for a reexamination of both the theory and policy of legal enforcement.

DID REFORM OF THE NON‐GROUP HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET AFFECT THE DECISION TO BE SELF‐EMPLOYED? EVIDENCE FROM STATE REFORMS IN THE 1990s

This paper estimates whether state-level implementation of community rating and guaranteed issue regulations in the non-group health insurance market during the 1990s affected the decision of taxpayers to be self-employed. Using a panel of tax returns that span 1987-2000, we find no statistically significant effect of the reforms on the propensity to be self-employed overall, although we find evidence of an increase in self-employment among older taxpayers and weaker evidence of decreases among younger cohorts.

The properties of income risk in privately held businesses

Our paper represents the first attempt in the literature to estimate the properties of business income risk from privately held businesses in the US. Using a new, large, and confidential panel of US income tax returns for the period 1987-2009, we extensively document the empirical stylized facts about the evolution of various business income risk measures over time. We find that business income is much riskier than labor income, not only because of the probability of business exit, but also because of higher income fluctuations, conditional on no exit. We show that business income is less persistent, but is also characterized by higher probabilities of extreme upward transition, compared to labor income. Furthermore, the distribution of percent changes for business income is more dispersed than that for labor income, and it also indicates that business income faces substantially higher tail risks. Our results suggest that the high-income households are more likely to bear both the big positive and the big negative business income percent changes.

The Impact of Health Reform on Job Mobility: Evidence from Massachusetts

This paper estimates the impact of the implementation of the 2006 Massachusetts health reform on job mobility. Theoretically, the effect is ambiguous, as the public health insurance expansion and low-income subsidies would be expected to increase mobility, but the employer mandate and price effects could either increase or decrease mobility depending on the relative impacts on an individuals current job and the attractiveness of other modes of employment or retirement. Utilizing data from tax returns that span 2002–10, in which job changes are identified using employer information reported on W-2 forms, we estimate the impact of the Massachusetts reform using a difference-in-differences approach, comparing the prevalence of job changes in Massachusetts to those of a comparison group, while controlling for individual fixed effects. The estimates suggest the Massachusetts reform generally did not have a significant impact on job separations overall, though it may have increased separations from primary jobs among married women. There is evidence, however, that mobility increased among low-income married couples, young married men, and older married women.

THE IMPACT OF INSURANCE SUBSIDIES ON SELF-EMPLOYMENT: DO STATE NON-GROUP HEALTH INSURANCE REGULATIONS MATTER?

This paper tests whether the effect of tax‐based subsidies for self‐employed health insurance on the level of self‐employment differs with the type of non‐group insurance regulatory regime at the state level. Using a panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2004, we estimate fixed effects instrumental variable regressions for the probability of being self‐employed, allowing the effect of the after‐tax price of self‐employed health insurance to differ by regulatory regime. Our results suggest that states with community rating and guaranteed issue regulations had significantly smaller increases in the fraction of taxpayers reporting some amount of self‐employment income as a result of a decrease in the after‐tax price of self‐employed health insurance. However, there is suggestive evidence that heavily regulated states experienced a larger increase in exclusive self‐employment, particularly among older taxpayers.

Rising Inequality: Transitory or Permanent? New Evidence from a Panel of U.S. Tax Returns 1987-2006

We use a new, large, and confidential panel of tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service to shed light on the permanent versus transitory nature of rising inequality in individual male labor earnings and in total household income, both before and after taxes, in the United States over the period 1987-2006. Due to the quality and the significant size of our dataset, we are able to conduct our analysis using rich and precisely estimated error-components models of income dynamics. Our main specification finds evidence for a quadratic heterogeneous income profiles component and a random walk component in permanent earnings, and for a moving-average component in autoregressive transitory earnings. We find that the increase in inequality over our sample period was entirely permanent for male earnings, and predominantly permanent for household income. We also show that the tax system, though reducing inequality, nonetheless did not materially affect its increasing trend. Furthermore, we compare our model-based findings against those of simpler, non-model based inequality decomposition methods. We show that the results for the trends in the evolution of the permanent and transitory variances are remarkably similar across methods, whereas the results for the shares of those variances in cross-sectional inequality differ widely. Further investigation into the sources of these differences suggests that simpler methods produce erroneous decompositions because they cannot flexibly capture the relative degree of persistence of the transitory component of income.

Does Health Reform Lead to an Increase in Early Retirement? Evidence from Massachusetts

This article estimates the impact of the 2006 Massachusetts health reform on the decision of individuals to retire early. Using data from the American Community Survey that spans 2004 through 2012, the authors estimate difference-in-differences models for retirement using individuals from other northeastern states as the control group. The estimates suggest that the reform led women to increase early retirement from full-time work by 1.1 percentage points (from a base of 4.8%) and to increase part-time work by 1.1 percentage points (from a base of 30%). Though no significant effects were found for men overall, the estimates imply that the reform led to an increase in retirement and part-time work among lower-income men.

Rising Inequality: Transitory or Permanent? New Evidence from a U.S. Panel of Household Income 1987-2006

We use a new and large panel dataset of household income to shed light on the permanent versus transitory nature of rising inequality in individual male labor earnings and in total household income, both before and after taxes, in the United States over the period 1987-2006. Due to the quality and the significant size of our dataset, we are able to conduct our analysis using rich and precisely estimated error-components models of income dynamics. Our main specification finds evidence for a quadratic heterogeneous income profiles component and a random walk component in permanent earnings, and for a moving-average component in autoregressive transitory earnings. We find that the increase in inequality over our sample period was entirely permanent for male earnings, and predominantly permanent for household income. We also show that the tax system, though reducing inequality, nonetheless did not materially affect its increasing trend. Furthermore, we compare our model-based findings against those of simpler, non-model based inequality decomposition methods. We show that the results for the trends in the evolution of the permanent and transitory variances are remarkably similar across methods, whereas the results for the shares of those variances in cross-sectional inequality differ widely. Further investigation into the sources of these differences suggests that simpler methods produce erroneous decompositions because they cannot flexibly capture the relative degree of persistence of the transitory component of income.

The impact of the Affordable Care Act on self‐employment

This paper estimates the impact of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014 on the decision to be self-employed. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we employ two identification strategies. Utilizing prereform variation in state nongroup health insurance market regulations, we find that the ACA did not increase self-employment overall in states that lacked similar provisions in their nongroup markets prior to 2014. In specifications that utilize variation across individuals in characteristics that could make it harder for them to purchase insurance if they left their current employer, we also do not find that the ACA differentially increased self-employment. However, in states that lacked the ACA nongroup market provisions, we do find a statistically significant increase in the second year of implementation (when individuals had more time to adjust behavior and the exchanges functioned properly) among individuals eligible for insurance subsidies, suggesting that a combination of time to adjust, low uncertainty and low insurance costs may be necessary for nongroup health insurance reforms to impact self-employment.

Immigrant–native differences in employment-based retirement plan participation

This paper examines differences between immigrant and native employees in retirement plan participation using SIPP data. We find that the participation rate among natives is 60 percent, while the native-immigrant participation gap ranges from 10.9 percentage points for naturalized citizens to 35.4 percentage points for non-permanent residents. Controlling for demographic and job characteristics can explain up to half of the gap. Decomposing the overall immigrant-native difference into differences in employer offers, plan eligibility, and plan take-up shows that the likelihood of working for an employer that offers a plan is the primary driver of the overall gap.