, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Molly Bunke, Kevin DeLuca, Sabrina Lee, and Amy Wickett provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Treasury. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the UnitedEach year, more than 11 million individuals around the world are imprisoned prior to conviction. The United States leads all other countries with approximately half a million individuals detained before trial on any given day, nearly double the next highest country, China (Walmsley 2013). The high rate of pretrial detention in the United States is due to both the widespread use of monetary bail and the limited financial resources of most defendants. Nationwide, less than 25 percent of felony defendants are released without financial conditions, and the typical felony defendant is assigned a bail amount of more than $55,000
Recent evidence suggests consumers pay less attention to commodity taxes levied at the register than to taxes included in a good's posted price. If this attention gap is larger for high-income consumers than for low-income consumers, policymakers can manipulate a tax's regressivity by altering the fraction of the tax imposed at the register. We investigate income differences in attentiveness to cigarette taxes, exploiting state and time variation in cigarette excise and sales tax rates. Whereas all consumers respond to taxes that appear in cigarettes' posted price, our results suggest that only low-income consumers respond to taxes levied at the register. (JEL D12, H22, H25, H71, L66)
We evaluate a randomized outreach study in which the IRS sent informational letters to 3.9 million households that paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Drawing on administrative data, we study the effect of this intervention on taxpayers subsequent health insurance enrollment and mortality. We find the intervention led to increased coverage during the subsequent two years and reduced mortality among middle-aged adults over the same time period. The results provide experimental evidence that health insurance coverage can reduce mortality in the United States.
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