Chandler Inman

Working Papers

Baby Steps in Tax Policy: Impacts of the Federal Adoption Tax Credit (JMP)

Abstract: The federal adoption tax credit is among the largest credits claimable by an individual filer in the US and is one of the primary tools used to facilitate child adoption. A temporary reform in 2010 and 2011 made the credit fully refundable, affording the opportunity to trace the heterogeneous adoption response of taxpayers across the distribution of tax liability. The estimates imply increasing access to the credit was effective at encouraging child adoption, inducing an additional 36,188 adoptions among those impacted by reform and that the average fiscal cost of encouraging an additional adoption ranges between $15,500 and $17,500.

Not Without My Sister: The Impact of Same Sex Marriage on the Placement Outcomes of Foster Children 

Abstract: How did same-sex marriage reform impact the capacity of social workers to find families for children in foster care? This paper finds extending marriage rights increased the probability children in their first year of care were matched to families by roughly 4 percentage points. In addition, this paper proposes a new method to impute siblings using administrative data. The estimates suggest reform enabled social workers to place more siblings together, decreasing the rate of sibling separation by roughly 7 percentage points. Using a quantitative foster care matching model, this paper parses the relative gain in welfare across child demographics and estimates the portion of gain attributable to decreased sibling separation, using the revealed preferences of the average social worker. Reform is found to increase aggregate welfare, with the highest gains accruing to older children. The model suggests had all gains in welfare gone to older children, the increase in welfare induced by reform would be equivalent to reducing their probability of going unmatched by 12 percentage points. 

Proof in Pricing: Tax Salience and Consumer Behavior in the Liquor Market (with Katherine Fairley)

Abstract: To what extent does tax salience affect consumers’ purchases of alcohol? In 2010, the Canadian province of British Columbia harmonized its provincial and federal sales taxes, effectively lowering the tax rate on liquor by 3%. To mitigate the potential increase in alcohol consumption from this cost decrease, the provincial government increased centrally-determined alcoholic beverage shelf-prices by an amount exactly offsetting the tax decrease, so that the after-tax prices were unchanged. Because liquor stores in the province post tax-exclusive shelf-prices, if consumers were unaware of the decrease in the tax rate, this change would appear to them as a significant price increase. Consistent with a parsimonious model of consumer behavior with salience effects, we find consumers responded to this cost neutral change by decreasing their purchases of alcohol by approximately 4%. In addition, we propose a methodology to estimate the level of salience during reform.