New Publication from the Compton Pledge: Insights for Tax Credit Policy Design

Nika Soon-Shiong (Fund for Guaranteed Income), Eli Berk-Rauch (Fund for Guaranteed Income), and Jack Landry (Jain Family Institute) have released a new whitepaper drawing lessons from our collaborative guaranteed income study in Compton, California.

From the executive summary:

The Jain Family Institute, the Fund for Guaranteed Income and the Office of Mayor Aja Brown implemented the Compton Pledge: a two-year initiative delivering between $300-600 a month to 800 families in Compton, CA. The pilot was designed to identify policies and issues meaningful to the Compton community, applicable to broader policies, and timely to the challenges facing low-income households today. The study specifically tested policy reforms related to the 2021 Pandemic-Era Expansion of the Child Tax Credit in a randomized control trial. This allowed researchers to isolate the effects of design choices in a way that the expanded CTC could not, offering new insights and responding to criticisms with hard data.

The policy brief uses the results of the guaranteed income pilot to rebut conservative arguments for abandoning Child Tax Credit (CTC) reforms. It offers the following recommendations for tax credit policy design: Expand choice: Monthly advanced CTC payments should be allowed. Expand eligibility: Conservatives argue expanding the CTC (like 2021) will discourage single mothers from working, but they worked more, earning an additional $317 per month. Expand generosity: Compton households who receive the equivalent of a more generous CTC (they got CTC plus pledge payment) worked more.

View the full paper.