205 National Tax Journal Vol. LX, No. 2 June 2007 Abstract With many countries considering the adoption of a system of earned income tax credits, it is useful to analyze how different types of credits affect labor supply and earnings. This paper focuses on a 1999 reform to the UK tax credit system, which increased the value of the credit and reduced the phaseout rate. Using panel data, with ind...

Spousal and Survivor Benefits in Option Value Models of Retirement: An Application to Belgium1 We study retirement incentives with augmented option value model à la Stock and Wise (1990). We propose methodological extensions to better reflect the respective incentives faced by singles and couples. Our results show that a more comprehensive modelling of couples’ incentives leads to very differen...

The authors present findings from a largescale, random-assignment evaluation of Building Strong Families (BSF), a program offering group sessions on relationship skills education to low-income, unmarried parents who were expecting or had recently had a baby. Findings based on a 3-year follow-up survey of over 4,000 couples indicate that BSF did not succeed in its central objectives of improving...

OBJECTIVES This study analyzed the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and the prevalence of mutually occurring health problems among married couples in late midlife. METHODS Data consisted of 4746 married couples aged 51 to 61 years from the 1992 US Health and Retirement Study. Two health measures were used: (1) self-assessed health status and (2) an index of functional limitation...

INTRODUCTION This book review analyzes the complex and profound impact active religious participation has on relationships and family outcomes among African Americans and Latinos. In Soul Mates, Wilcox and Wolfinger discuss the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws and the resulting devastating effects on African American and Latino families despite their high religious involvement. The authors m...

D ATA on health insurance ownership and use of hospitals were collected in the national survey of a sample of beneficiaries conducted by the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance in the fall of 1957. The following highlights on ownership of hospitalization insurance or hospital-surgical insurance and on use of general hospitals by the aged persons in the surveyed families are from the preli...

Pensions are an important and increasingly common supplement to Social Security benefits for persons aged 65 or older--particularly for those in the the middle and upper income quintiles. By 1990, pension income was reported by 44 percent of all elderly units--57 percent of the couples and 34 percent of unmarried persons. This article discusses the role of pensions in the income of the elderly;...

The Effects of In-Work Benefit Reform in Britain on Couples: Theory and Evidence This paper examines the effects of the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples in Britain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using panel data from the British Household Panel Surv...

Mr. ISRAEL. Mr. Speaker, Getting married shouldn’t mean saying ‘I do;’ to higher taxes. In my state of New York over one and a half million couples are burdened by the marriage penalty, nearly 60,000 in my district alone. This occurs when married couples pay more than an unmarried couple with the same income. For example two individuals, living together, but not married, each with incomes of $3...