Why Don't Taxpayers Maximize their Tax-Based Student Aid? Salience and Inertia in Program Selection

Turner Nicholas ()
Additional contact information
Turner Nicholas: Office of Tax Analysis, US Treasury

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2011, vol. 11, issue 1, 24

Abstract: Tax-based federal student aid is designed to increase postsecondary attendance and ease the financial burden of higher education enrollment by offering students and their families a menu of tax incentives. However, many taxpayers who are eligible for more than one tax-based aid program, and who are limited to one program per student each year, fail to select the single program that offers the largest reduction in taxes. Analyzing a panel dataset of individual income tax returns, I find that in roughly one out of four returns taxpayers and paid preparers fail to select the tax-minimizing tax-based aid program. I find evidence that greater salience of federal tax effects, and inertia in program selection, leads some taxpayers and paid preparers to make non-tax-minimizing selections. Streamlining the set of tax-based aid programs into a single tax incentive is likely to be a more effective way of lowering the costs of postsecondary attendance for students and their families.

Keywords: salience; inertia; default behavior; tax-based student aid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1682.2896 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:11:y:2011:i:1:n:75

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.2896

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().