1

Introduction

Child poverty in the United States poses a major challenge to American society. Poverty, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as a family’s lack of sufficient financial resources to achieve a minimum standard of living, can prevent children from having their needs for proper nutrition, clothing, and housing met. Poverty often coincides with living in unsafe neighborhoods lacking strong communities. Overall, poverty makes it difficult for children to develop productively and achieve economic, social, and personal success as adults (Duncan et al., 2010; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [National Academies], 2019).

The Census Bureau issues a yearly report that counts the number of children and adults in poverty in the United States. The Census Bureau defines a family to be in poverty if its income is below specific thresholds (i.e., “poverty lines”) that differ by family size, number of children, and cost of living in specific geographic locations. Thresholds are defined in terms of the income necessary to purchase minimal amounts of food, clothing, and housing.¹ Children are defined as being in poverty if they live in families with incomes below the poverty line. For example, according to the national average SPM (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of the SPM), the threshold in 2022 for a family with two adults and two children living in a rental apartment in the United States was $34,518.

According to the latest Census Bureau report (Shrider & Creamer, 2023), which used the poverty threshold defined by the SPM, 12.4% of

___________________

¹ See Table B-1 in Creamer et al. (2022) for poverty thresholds for two-adult, two-child households for the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) in 2020 and 2021.

U.S. children under age 18 (a total of 9 million children) lived in families with incomes below the SPM poverty threshold in 2022. Child poverty rates were higher for Black children (17.8%; 2.4 million) and Hispanic children (19.5%; 3.7 million). In addition, 3.3% of U.S. children under age 18 (2.4 million) lived in what is referred to as deep poverty—families with incomes less than half of the $34,518 SPM poverty threshold ($17,259, adjusted for family size).

As measured by the SPM, the child poverty rate has fluctuated over time, although it has mostly trended downward since regular reporting by the Census Bureau began in 2011: from 18% in 2011 to 12.4% in 2022. Embedded within this trend is the swift reduction in the childhood poverty rate that occurred in 2020 (a 9.7% decline) and 2021 (a 5.2% decline), with similar reductions for all racial and ethnic groups. This reduction in child poverty coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic (hereafter, “the pandemic”).

In the United States, the pandemic began in spring 2020 and triggered the most severe economic downturn since the Great Recession of 2008. Between February and April 2020, the unemployment rate soared from 3.5% to 14.7%, as tens of millions of Americans lost jobs and earnings due to widespread economic shutdowns and societal disruptions. While the economy began to recover in summer 2020, the unemployment rate remained elevated, declining to 6.7% by the end of the year. Recovery continued through 2021, and by 2022, many key economic indicators—including employment and gross domestic product—had largely returned to pre-pandemic (2019) levels, although some sectors and populations experienced slower rebounds (Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.b., 2020, 2021).

The federal government’s policy response to the pandemic was unprecedented, with $5 trillion spent on a wide variety of programs. Large increases in unemployment payments were a major source of replacement income for many individuals and families who had experienced job loss, including many low-income families. Three rounds of stimulus checks were distributed to families and individuals across a broad income range, including those with incomes of up to $150,000 for joint filers and $75,000 for single filers. For low-income families, these payments provided additional amounts for each dependent child. Other programs specifically aimed at low-income families also increased their benefits, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Medicaid eligibility followed continuous enrollment rules, which temporarily suspended the need for most enrollees to renew their eligibility and allowed individuals to maintain coverage without updating their information or demonstrating that they met eligibility requirements.

The federal government’s response also included adjustments to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which are the focus of this report. The CTC, established by federal legislation in

1997, provides income tax credits to families with children below certain, fairly high, income levels. The CTC was designed as a nonrefundable credit, which means that its main provision provides credit only against positive tax liability. As most poor families have no tax liability, they are unlikely to benefit until their income rises to substantial levels. However, the law also contains a provision for a gradual phase-in of the credit as earnings rise, even without positive tax liability. The size of the credit was a maximum of $1,000 per child prior to 2017 but was increased to $2,000 in 2017 legislation that took effect in 2018.

Through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the CTC was temporarily expanded in 2021, providing a credit of $3,600 per child under age 6 and a credit of $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17. Equally important, the credit was made fully refundable, which means that tax filing units could claim the full credit even if they had no earnings. This change eliminated the existing earnings requirement and credit phase-in, extending the credit to the lowest-income families. In addition, while ordinarily tax credits are only received the year following the year when the income is earned (e.g., at tax filing time in Spring 2022 for income earned in 2021), monthly payments were allowed immediately after the ARPA legislation passed in 2021, meaning families were eligible to receive up to half of their credit on a monthly basis.

The EITC is a tax credit for families with low- and moderate-income levels that was first enacted in 1975 congressional legislation and has been increased in generosity periodically since that year. The EITC is provided only to families with earned income, and the size of the credit increases as earnings increase up to a certain level, then stays constant for another interval of earnings, and is then phased out as earnings increase beyond that point. The EITC is a refundable tax credit, which means that it is provided to eligible families regardless of whether they have existing tax liability and regardless of the level of that liability. The EITC is provided almost entirely to families with children, but legislation in 1993 began to allow a very small tax credit for childless families.

The ARPA legislation in 2021 also had provisions to temporarily expand the EITC, but this expansion was only to increase substantially the size of the tax credit going to eligible childless adults, which is not directly relevant to the committee’s study of child poverty rates. The size of the EITC credit for families with children was unchanged.² Consequently, the

___________________

² A very small number of families have both children and childless adults who could claim the childless adult EITC; this is quite rare. However, the ARPA legislation did allow families to use earnings in 2020 as well as 2021 to qualify for the credit in 2021, since it was expected that the 2021 pandemic would lower many families’ earnings below their normal level. For data reasons, the committee does not attempt to capture this provision and its impact on EITC eligibility and tax credit levels.

EITC provisions in the 2021 ARPA legislation had very little impact on families with children and therefore on child poverty.

CHARGE TO THE COMMITTEE

In response to a congressional mandate required by the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023,³ the National Academies undertook a study to review and assess the impacts of the 2021 EITC and 2021 CTC on poverty among children. With support from the Bainum Family Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the Russell Sage Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Academy of Sciences W. K. Kellogg Foundation Fund, the National Academy of Sciences Cecil and Ida Green Fund, the National Academy of Sciences Independent Fund, the National Academy of Engineering Independent Fund, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Presidents’ Circle Fund, the Committee on Federal Policy Impacts on Child Poverty was appointed to carry out this charge. This 15-member committee included individuals with disciplinary expertise in economics, public policy, sociology, demography, human development, program delivery, and social welfare.

The principal elements of the congressional charge were as follows: to review how the 2021 CTC and the 2021 EITC affected poverty among all U.S. children; to assess the impacts of these programs on poverty levels within specific populations of U.S. children; to evaluate how the implementation of the 2021 CTC influenced participation in the program and, in turn, its effectiveness in reducing child poverty; to examine how implementation practices either facilitated or hindered access to the CTC—and how this affected child poverty across racial, ethnic, immigrant, and other demographic groups; and to identify changes to tax rules, eligibility requirements, and administrative procedures that could further reduce the number of U.S. children in poverty. The statement of task also directed the committee to measure poverty rates using the SPM, a measurement method currently used by the Census Bureau. The full text of the committee’s charge is presented in Box 1-1.

Interpreting the Charge

The charge has four elements. The committee interpreted the first element of the charge as a request to estimate the impacts on child poverty in 2021 of all components of the full EITC and CTC programs as they

___________________

³ H.R.2617 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617/text

operated that year, which is referred to as the Combined EITC & CTC Policies in 2021, relative to having neither program in place. While estimating the impact of the combined credits in 2021 was necessary for addressing the first part of its charge, the committee determined that it was also important to isolate separate impacts for several configurations of these credits, as they are likely to have differing impacts on child poverty (discussed in detail in Chapter 2).

The committee identified seven separate configurations of the provisions of the CTC and EITC that were of interest, a priori, for assessing their impacts on child poverty. These configurations are labeled and described in Box 1-2. The first three are for the CTC: the first one for the provisions

of the CTC enacted under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (called TCJA CTC Only); the second for the expanded amounts and coverage enacted under ARPA (ARPA CTC Expansion); and the third being the CTC policy in place in 2021 (CTC Policy in 2021), which is the combination of these first two CTC provisions. A somewhat parallel set of configurations are listed in Box 1-2 for the EITC: the first for the provisions of the EITC under the permanent U.S. tax code, which have been in effect since 2015, except for 2021 under ARPA (called EITC [excl. ARPA] or non-ARPA EITC); the second represents the changes to the EITC under ARPA (ARPA EITC Expansion); and the third is the EITC policy that prevailed in 2021 (EITC Policy in 2021), which is the combination of the first two provisions. Finally, the last

row of Box 1-2 references the combined EITC and CTC policies that were in place in 2021 (Combined EITC & CTC Policies in 2021). As discussed below and in subsequent chapters, these terms characterize the particular policy components whose impacts on child poverty are analyzed in this report.

A narrow interpretation of the first element of the committee’s charge would be to only consider the effects of the Combined EITC & CTC Policies in 2021 on child poverty. But the committee took the view that it would be useful to separately assess the impacts of some of the components listed in Box 1-2. In particular, the committee chose to separate out the impacts of the provisions of the CTC under ARPA on child poverty in 2021 from

the ARPA expansion of the CTC given that, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 8, these provisions affected different parts of the income distribution, including households with no work-related earnings. While the committee considered assessing what the separate impacts of the EITC would be on child poverty in 2021, with and without the ARPA expansion provisions, as previously noted and discussed in further detail in Chapter 2, the latter expansion mostly affected childless tax filers. For this reason, the committee focused on analyzing the overall impact of the EITC Policy in 2021 and not of its non-ARPA and ARPA components.

The second and third elements of the statement of task ask the committee to study the impacts of the implementation of the CTC in 2021 on children overall and on specific subgroups of children. The committee interpreted these elements to refer to the ARPA CTC Expansion, which was only passed by Congress in 2021 and was subject to a hurried rollout. Unfortunately, there is very little research on this question and, consequently, the committee was unable to report in detail on implementation issues. The committee did study the broad issue of take-up of the CTC—that is, how many eligible families actually received the credit—and some indirect evidence on 2021 implementation is contained in that review. The committee also conducted discussions with mothers who received the CTC—described as the study of lived experience in this report—and this also provides some evidence on the implementation issue (see Chapter 5). Finally, the committee held a workshop that brought together several experts in the area of what is called “administrative burden,” which includes studies of the difficulties families encounter when attempting to participate in programs like the CTC. The committee’s findings from its work in this area are reported in specific chapters, noted below.

The fourth element of the statement of task asked the committee to consider alternative policies that might be adopted to increase the impact of the EITC and CTC on reducing child poverty. To do so, the committee evaluated the impacts on child poverty of a range of options that varied provisions of the EITC and CTC compared to “current law” (see the last row of Box 1-2 for a description of what is meant by current law) and compared to a modified version of the provisions under ARPA (see the second-to-last row of Box 1-2 for a description of these provisions). The committee decided to assess the potential impacts of these policy options on child poverty using data in a year proceeding the pandemic (2018) in an attempt to mitigate the influence of other pandemic-related factors and policies in 2021. In addressing this element of the statement of task, the committee examined how accounting for employment effects might be expected to affect the impacts of these alternative policy options on child poverty, and how these impacts would likely differ across subgroups and for households at different places in the income distribution.

In conducting its work on the four elements of the statement of task, the committee encountered many challenges in using the available data to address those elements, in the research base that has provided partial answers to the questions posed by those elements, and in limitations of current research methodologies used to address data and research gaps. To provide future guidance for policy makers, the committee consequently undertook to identify specific data, research, and methodological gaps that are important to address in the future. While not formally a part of the statement of task, the committee interpreted this effort as consistent with the spirit of the statement of task and with its forward-looking emphasis.

Study Methods

The full committee met eight times. To inform its deliberations, four public sessions were held with professionals whose knowledge of and perspectives on the EITC and CTC complemented the committee’s expertise. Two sessions focused on insights from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) and included presentations on existing work using the CPS ASEC and Internal Revenue Service (IRS)-linked data to examine the impacts of the EITC and CTC on child poverty. In two other sessions, speakers shared their expertise and perspectives on administering the EITC and CTC as well as on policy related to these credits.⁴

To calculate the impacts of the EITC and CTC policies in 2021 on child poverty and of alternative configurations of these credits on child poverty, both overall and for subgroups, the committee commissioned the Urban Institute and several other consultants to perform analyses using the Transfer Income Model version 3 (TRIM3). The committee also engaged with the Urban Institute and consultants to calculate the estimated impacts of the committee’s alternative policy options for the EITC and CTC on child poverty.

Finally, the committee partnered with the Aspen Institute to convene four closed listening sessions. These sessions provided the committee with perspectives from families and nonprofit service-delivery organizations regarding their “lived experiences” with the EITC and CTC during the pandemic in general, and in 2021 in particular (see Chapter 5).

___________________

⁴ https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/29107

PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON THE IMPACT OF THE EITC AND CTC AND THEIR IMPACT ON CHILD POVERTY

As noted above, the committee focused its efforts on the first element of the statement of task on estimating the impacts of the various components of EITC and CTC policies implemented in 2021. This section reviews past analyses of the impact of these programs on child poverty.

For the TCJA CTC without the 2021 ARPA expansion, Census Bureau estimates showed that the 2021 child poverty rate of 5.2% would have been 6.2% without that addition, meaning that the TCJA CTC moved just under 1 million children out of poverty (Burns & Fox, 2022).

For the ARPA CTC Expansion, the Census Bureau estimated that the 2021 child poverty rate of 5.2% would have been 8.1% without that program, meaning that the ARPA CTC Expansion lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty. Wimer et al. (2022) found similar results.⁵ To the committee’s knowledge, there have been no studies of the impact of the ARPA EITC Expansion on child poverty, only estimates of the impact of the non-ARPA EITC.⁶ The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2016) estimated that the 2013 EITC lifted 3.2 million children out of poverty, meaning that elimination of that credit would have raised the 2013 child poverty rate from 18% to 22%. Using a poverty definition similar but not identical to the SPM, Hoynes and Patel (2018) estimated that an expansion of the EITC in 1993 lowered the poverty rate for less-educated single mothers by 7 percentage points.⁷ Using administrative tax data and a poverty threshold similar to that of Hoynes and Patel (2018), Jones and Ziliak (2022) found the EITC to have removed 1.7 million children from poverty in 2016, in the absence of which the child poverty rate would have been 18% instead of 15%.⁸ Chapter 8 provides updated estimates of the impact of these programs on child poverty in 2021, using modified methods and examining impacts across various demographic groups in the low-income population.

Box 1-3 summarizes previous National Academies’ work related to child poverty.

___________________

⁵ See Bitler (2023) for a detailed discussion of the literature on the estimated impacts of the ARPA-expanded CTC on poverty, including a discussion of two studies using different data and methodologies, by Parolin et al. (2022) and Han et al. (2022).

⁶ Bahk et al. (2024) estimated the EITC to have lowered the child poverty rate from 18% to 16% in 2021 but that reduction occurred after the impact of social insurance and in-kind transfers had lowered the poverty rate but before the ARPA-expanded CTC and economic impact payments had and, hence, used a nonstandard definition of impact.

⁷ This study captured the employment effects of the EITC and is the only study cited here that did so.

⁸ Ziliak (2015) also estimated the impact of the EITC but used the poverty threshold used for the Official Poverty Measure instead of the SPM threshold.

IMPACTS OF THE EITC AND CTC ON OTHER DIMENSIONS OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND PARENTAL TIME

The committee’s statement of task has a relatively narrow charge, focusing on the effects of the Combined EITC & CTC Policies in 2021 on child poverty rates and the effects of potential policy options that could further reduce child poverty, as measured by the SPM. However, there are two areas the report does not address in detail which the committee wishes to highlight here.

First, the EITC and CTC may have both short- and long-term effects on other measures of economic well-being but also on broader aspects of families’ and children’s social and psychological well-being. These broader outcomes—often included in more comprehensive assessments of family and social welfare—can include food insecurity and insufficiency; ease or difficulty paying bills, mortgage, or rent; consumption and spending behavior; mental and physical health; educational attainment; childbearing; marriage; and financial stability, among others. With respect to the ARPA CTC Expansion, several studies have evaluated its effects on some of these

outcomes.⁹ Additionally, several past studies have examined the impacts of the EITC on similar dimensions (e.g., Nichols & Rothstein, 2015).¹⁰

This report does not assess the impacts of the EITC and CTC on these broader indicators or on child development more generally. It also does not address the impacts of the EITC and CTC on long-term outcomes. However, existing evidence suggests that the impact of these tax credits, particularly the EITC, is likely to extend beyond immediate improvements in children’s material well-being to influence their long-term development and adult outcomes and depends on their policy design. For example, economists view child development as an “investment” process in which parents and society devote financial resources, parental time, and time of teachers, caregivers, and others to improve children’s skills, health, and other measures of well-being and attainment, both today but especially across their lives.¹¹

A closely related framework considers children’s well-being intergenerationally (i.e., examining how investments in young people today may improve the well-being of future generations). For example, the recent National Academies’ report Reducing Intergenerational Poverty (2024) examined key drivers of intergenerational poverty and economic mobility, and reviewed evidence on policies and programs that reduce the long-term impacts of poverty.

Another perspective warns about the potential trade-offs that certain policy designs might create—such as reductions in parental employment, declines in marriage rates, or slower overall economic growth due to increased public expenditures—which, over time, could negatively affect overall family well-being.¹²

While the committee’s statement of task did not call for this broader set of measures of child well-being or a determination of how the EITC and CTC could affect them, this does not diminish their relevance for assessing the consequences of the tax credits for child development and

___________________

⁹ See, for example, Aizer et al. (2023), Fisher et al. (2023), Gennetian and Gassman-Pines (2023), and Moellman et al. (2023).

¹⁰ For reviews of the literature on the effects of the EITC on various child and later-life outcomes, see Nichols and Rothstein (2015), Hoynes and Schanzenbach (2018), Aizer et al. (2022), Waldfogel (2025), and Michelmore (2025).

¹¹ See Attanasio et al. (2022) for a review of the literature on the development of children growing up in poverty from this perspective. See also Aizer et al. (2023), which reviews the literature on the impacts of the ARPA-expanded CTC from a child-development perspective.

¹² See, for example, Winship (2021).

well-being.¹³ For example, research has assessed the effects of the EITC and child allowance-type policies directly on child outcomes, as well as their effects on parental behaviors—for example, employment, marriage, and childbearing—which might indirectly affect child poverty and other well-being outcomes over the long term.¹⁴

Second, the committee adjusts estimates of the impacts on child poverty of the various policy provisions it evaluated for parents’ employment responses to these policy changes, but it did not consider other possible responses to these policies by parents and their consequences for children and their well-being. The EITC and CTC policies in place in 2021, and that prevailed at other times, likely affected not only time spent at work, but also time spent in other activities, such as reading to young children or helping with homework—activities relevant for child poverty, as well as children’s well-being and development. Alternatively, these tax credits might affect parental behaviors in ways other than employment, such as decisions around marriage and household composition, which may also impact child outcomes but are beyond the scope of this report. The committee did not include these behavioral effects either.

A small body of literature examines how the EITC, but not the CTC, affects not only how much time parents spend working but also how they allocate their time more generally, including time invested in their children’s development. For example, Bastian and Lochner (2022) evaluated the impact of changes in the maximum EITC, which is conditioned on employment, on time allocation, finding that while more generous EITC benefits increased unmarried mothers’ time working for pay, those benefits did not appear to reduce parental time spent in activities such as reading to or playing with young children or helping with homework. Rather, they found that the increased time spent working (and generating earnings) tended to reduce mothers’ time spent on other activities, such as household work, shopping, and errands. The committee did not find any existing peer-reviewed literature examining the impacts of the CTC on parents’

___________________

¹³ In a recent assessment of the effects of increased financial resources to low-income families on many of these outcomes, Page (2024) noted that, “my reading of the evidence suggests that policies providing financial resources to economically vulnerable families have the potential to improve children’s outcomes” (p. 891). However, Page does note that the “magnitude of predicted impacts varies considerably across studies” and that this heterogeneity in impact estimates “may be related to specific features of the income-generating event that researchers leverage” to identify these impacts (p. 891).

¹⁴ Research on child allowance-type programs, such as the Canada Child Benefit, Alaska dividend payments, and East Cherokee casino-based payments, assesses potential effects on children of policies similar to the provisions of the ARPA-expanded CTC with respect to providing cash benefits that are not conditioned on work, although these payments differ from the ARPA-expanded CTC in various dimensions. See Akee et al. (2010), Baker et al. (2023), and Goldsmith (2010).

time allocation and its consequences on their children, which is an area for further research. While the committee was not charged to address such questions, it acknowledges that the consequences of tax policy changes on time use is an important issue for assessing the full impact of these credits on child well-being and development.

ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT

This report is divided into 10 chapters and 9 appendixes. Chapter 2 describes key provisions of the EITC and CTC under pre-ARPA policy and under the 2021 ARPA reforms. Chapter 3 discusses measurement of child poverty. While the chapter focuses on the SPM, it also reviews other possible poverty measures and discusses the pros and cons of the SPM in the context of this study.

A key issue for evaluating the impacts of the 2021 EITC and 2021 CTC on child poverty involves understanding which families and households actually claimed these tax credits, an important issue in general as well as one relevant to the second and third elements of the statement of task on implementation. Chapter 4 reviews evidence on the take-up of credits, with particular attention to data sources used to assess take-up (including take-up across subgroups), as well as obstacles that might have affected take-up and compliance. Chapter 5 summarizes the qualitative research on people’s experiences and decision making around their participation in the CTC. This chapter also is relevant to the CTC implementation issues raised in the second and third elements of the statement of task.

Two particular challenges complicate any attempt to isolate the impacts of the provisions of the EITC and CTC in place in 2021 on child poverty or to determine how these effects differ across subgroups. First, the U.S. federal government, states, and localities responded to the pandemic by changing existing unemployment and safety net programs and initiating a range of cash payments to individuals and households to blunt the pandemic’s reduction of employment and household income. Chapter 6 reviews the pandemic-related policies and programs that complicate isolating the impacts of the 2021 provisions of the EITC and CTC on child poverty. Second, household heads and family members may have left the labor force or worked fewer hours in response to credits, reducing their income. Such “behavioral responses” to credits can affect families’ total resources and poverty status. Chapter 7 examines research on the impact of tax credits on employment responses. This chapter considers research both on employment effects in response to temporary tax credit changes like the ARPA CTC Policy in 2021, as well as effects from permanent or longer-term changes such as those of the provisions of the non-ARPA EITC and the

TCJA CTC and describes how these effects are reflected in the committee’s estimates within TRIM3.

Chapter 8 presents the committee’s estimates in response to the first important element of its charge—examining how the EITC Policy in 2021 and the CTC Policy in 2021, and the separate effects of the TCJA CTC and ARPA CTC Expansion, affected child poverty nationwide and across subgroups, using TRIM3 with data from the CPS ASEC. The chapter describes assumptions about credit take-up, evaluates these credits in the absence of other pandemic programs, and adjusts for employment effects. Chapter 9 estimates how potential policy changes to the EITC and CTC—including increases in benefit amounts, expanded eligibility, and changes to earnings requirements—would affect child poverty, with results shown for a range of scenarios using pre-pandemic data to simulate impacts under typical economic conditions. This chapter addresses the fourth element of the statement of task.

Finally, Chapter 10 presents the committee’s recommendations for improving data sources, including enhancements to the availability, presence, and quality of the measures they contain. The chapter also highlights key areas where further research is needed to better understand the potential impacts of future tax credit changes on child poverty in the United States.

The report includes several appendixes that provide details and background information on issues and topics that the committee considers important to the topic. Appendix A includes biosketches for committee members and staff, and Appendix B defines key terms used throughout the report. Appendix C details the similarities and differences between the Official Poverty Measure and the SPM. Appendix D provides a demographic portrait of child poverty in the United States for both 2021 and 2018, with the latter year providing a context to examine the distribution of child poverty across various groups and contexts prior to the pandemic. Appendix E summarizes evidence on the strengths and limitations of IRS and survey data to measure EITC and CTC take-up—relevant for the interpretation of the findings in Chapters 8 and 9. Appendix F summarizes the literature on labor supply elasticities and describes the strategy the committee used to adjust for employment responses to the EITC and CTC when estimating their impacts on child poverty. Appendixes G and I present additional tables on poverty effects that accompany Chapters 8 and 9, and Appendix H describes TRIM3, the steps it followed, and assumptions made to produce the committee’s estimates.

This page intentionally left blank.