Race, marriage, and the earned income tax credit

Abstract It is increasingly recognized that race interacts in important ways with taxation, including taxation of the family. In this paper, we quantify the racial disparity in the magnitude of the “marriage penalty” or “marriage bonus” in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) using individual micro-level data from the Current Population Survey from 1992 to 2019. We find that low-income Black households experience on average a 22 percent larger EITC marriage penalty than low-income white households, even when their family income levels are largely the same. We also suggest ways to mitigate these racial disparities.