Work Requirements and Child Tax Benefits

Many U.S. safety-net programs condition benefit eligibility on work. Eliminating work requirements would better target benefits to the neediest families but would also attenuate pro-work incentives. We study how expanding child tax credits to non-workers affects maternal labor supply, using administrative tax records and variation in state credit eligibility from quasi-random birth-timing. We employ a novel method for using placebo analyses to maximize the precision of our regression discontinuity estimator. Eliminating work requirements causes very few mothers to exit the labor force; our 95% confidence intervals exclude reductions over one-third of one percent.