Labor supply, deadweight loss and tax reform act of 1986: A nonparametric evaluation using panel data

Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA 1986) has provided an invaluable source of variation in tax rates to study the effects of tax reforms on labor supply in the US. Most existing studies exploiting variation generated by TRA 1986 have used cross-sectional variation in tax rates or assumed a linear labor supply function or have not couched their analysis in a nonlinear budget set framework. This paper uses the drastic variation in the budget set induced by TRA 1986 as a source of identification and combines two novel approaches to estimate behavioral effects of tax reforms. I first use nonparametric estimation methods with nonlinear budget sets [Blomquist, Sören, Newey, W., 2002. Nonparametric estimation with nonlinear budget sets. Econometrica 70 (6), 2455–2480] to estimate a labor supply function, using waves of PSID just before and after TRA 1986. Nonparametric method developed in Hausman and Newey [Hausman, J., Whitney Newey, 1995. Nonparametric measurement of exact consumer's surplus and deadweight loss. Econometrica 63, 1145–76] is then applied to estimate the deadweight loss from TRA 1986. The nonparametric estimate of the compensated wage elasticity is 0.22. I find that TRA 1986 had a small but positive effect on labor supply of men of about 2% at the sample mean. TRA 1986 was associated with robust reduction in deadweight loss from the pre-TRA 1986 level and this reduction is positively correlated with income and wages.