Reform Act Research Articles

Health Reform's Anniversary Stirs LTC Initiatives

Maybe it was inspired by the new beginnings of spring, but whatever it was, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rained “initiatives” like blossom petals on long-term care providers in March. Not to make light of any of them – they dealt with the weighty topics of antipsychotic medication prescribing in nursing homes, reducing avoidable hospitalizations, and training more advanced practice nurses to address the health care workforce shortage. The antipsychotics initiative was one with an unusual kickoff. The agency announced long in advance that it would launch its “Initiative to Improve Behavioral Health and Reduce the Use of Antipsychotic Medications in Nursing Homes Residents” on March 29 in a web-only video broadcast. Even beforehand though, the agency gave these provocative details: “As part of the initiative, CMS is developing a national action plan that will use a multidimensional approach including public reporting, raising public awareness, regulatory oversight, technical assistance/training and research. The action plan will be targeted at enhancing person-centered care for nursing home residents, particularly those with dementia-related behaviors.” As several AMDA leaders made clear in featured presentations at the annual AMDA meeting in San Antonio, antipsychotic prescribing to dementia patients will continue to be a hot topic in Washington. AMDA Board of Directors member Dr. Susan Levy, CMD, medical director at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital in Baltimore, was scheduled to present part of the broadcast. The other big March CMS initiative addresses another topic always high on the LTC agenda, hospital admissions of nursing home residents. The agency announced that it has $128 million to spend on “evidence-based interventions” to “reduce costly and avoidable hospitalizations among nursing facility residents.” The money in the “Initiative to Reduce Avoidable Hospitalizations among Nursing Facility Residents” will go to organizations independent of nursing homes that will, however, partner with the facilities and send in professionals with strategies for keeping residents there and safe. Eligible organizations “can include physician practices, care management organizations, and other public and not-for-profit entities,” according to the CMS announcement. Hints in the announcement at what kinds of efforts might win funding included: “For example, past demonstrations have reduced avoidable hospitalizations by deploying nurse practitioners in nursing facilities to manage residents' medical needs on the spot, when possible. Others have implemented quality improvement and communication tools to identify, assess, communicate, and document changes in resident status.” The agency said that its research has found that about 45% of hospital admissions of Medicare and Medicaid nursing home beneficiaries “could have been avoided, accounting for 314,000 potentially avoidable hospitalizations and $2.6 billion in Medicare expenditures in 2005.” Those are numbers that catch the attention of people concerned about health care spending – and they did. Nearly simultaneously with the CMS announcement, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) called on Congress to institute rehospitalization penalties for skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) of the type about to go into effect for hospitals. “SNF patients who are rehospitalized raise Medicare spending and are exposed to hospital-acquired infections and disruptive care transitions. Beginning in October 2012, a readmission policy will penalize hospitals with high readmission rates for certain conditions. A rehospitalization policy for SNFs would create comparable policies for SNFs and hospitals, thereby encouraging providers in both settings to work together to better manage the transitions between them …. A rehospitalization policy that penalizes facilities with high riskadjusted rates over multiple years would target providers with aberrant patterns of rehospitalization, recognize that some rehospitalizations are appropriate, and reduce the incentive to selectively admit beneficiaries with specific characteristics.” The full MedPAC report (which also repeated the commission's plea for an end to the Sustainable Growth Rate formula for Medicare fees) is available at www.medpac.gov/documents/Mar12_EntireReport.pdf. Information and application requests for the CMS hospitalization initiative are available at www.innovation.CMS.gov/initiatives/rahnfr. And, the Obama administration happened to note that the effort on resident hospitalizations was developed by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation and the Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office, both of which “were created by the Affordable Care Act.” Health reform also happened to be the genesis of a CMS initiative to “bolster the primary care workforce” by offering $200 million over 4 years to medical centers willing to train more nurse practitioners and other advanced practice registered nurses and send them out to nonhospital settings. Maybe it was just coincidence that so many health and long-term care initiatives were rolled out around the second anniversary of the health reform act (March 23). You know, the one that most Republicans pledge to repeal in their campaign materials.

Prison Litigation Reform Acts

Whether the Prison Litigation Reform Act was well aimed or effective is a challenging question. Advertised as stemming a flood of trivial prisoners' lawsuits in the federal courts, the PLRA erected obstacles to serious as well as frivolous complaints – like claims of racial discrimination or sexual abuse by prison staff that leaves no physical injury. And much of the time saved by dismissing cases is spent interpreting the PLRA's perplexing procedural rules. More and more often, courts are leaving prisoners (and pretrial detainees) to the vagaries of cash-starved prison systems. The author brings her years as a prisoners' rights litigator and Pro Se Law Clerk to bear on the issue of whether, in these days of economic recession and mass incarceration, it is prison rather than prison litigation that is truly in need of reform.

Dodd-Frank, sauvetage des institutions financières et crise financière : le problème du too interconnected to fail

Cet article soutient qu’il y a une omission importante dans la réforme financière Dodd-Frank, à savoir la question des institutions financières «?trop interconnectées pour faire faillite?» (too interconnected to fail, TITF). Si le Dodd-Frank Act promet qu’il n’y aura plus de sauvetages des banques et des banques non-banques (shadow banks) too big to fail (TBTF), le paradoxe qu’il y a à ne pas porter attention aux institutions TITF aura en fait pour conséquences d’augmenter le risque systémique dans certaines conditions, et d’instaurer un jeu de mécanismes complexes et compliqués pour «?sauver?» des institutions financières, en dépit des promesses politiques de ne plus le faire. C’est ce qui est fait lorsque l’on retire le pouvoir de «?sauvetage?» à la Réserve fédérale et que l’on crée une Orderly Liquidation Authority sur le modèle de la Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation qui, avec le département du Trésor, peut en réalité «?sauver?» les institutions financières dans certaines conditions. Mais cette nouvelle autorité pourrait échouer parce qu’elle se concentre uniquement sur les TBTF et omet de s’intéresser (aussi) aux structures TITF.Classification JEL?: G01, G18, G21, G28.

Children's well-being, adult poverty, and jobs-of-last-resort

This article addresses the failure of the 1996 welfare reform act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act [PRWORA]) as an anti-poverty program demonstrated by the fact that approximately half of all ‘welfare leavers’ have fallen back into poverty within a year or two of their exit. The proximate cause is that, because of “barriers to work” or insufficient demand, leavers end up working too few hours over the course of a year. To address this failure, we propose a program of jobs-of-last-resort, called Promise of a Job (POJ), based on an examination of the design, costs, and results for a large number of transitional-job and welfare-to-work programs. In this article, we estimate POJ's costs per participant and overall costs of implementation, as well as the impact such a program would have on reducing adult and, particularly, child poverty. We find, in examining past data, that had POJ been applied to just those Americans who were on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)...

<em>Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914</em>, by Matthew Roberts

Reviewed by: Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914 Joan Allen (bio) Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914, by Matthew Roberts; pp. vii + 231. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, £19.99 paper, $95.00, $31.00 paper. This engaging study of British popular movements between the 1832 Reform Act and the outbreak of the First World War is a welcome addition to Palgrave’s British History in Perspective series. In line with the reputation of its companion volumes, Matthew Roberts’s new text offers an authoritative reading of radical activism that will make it required reading for all undergraduate students and scholars interested in this aspect of nineteenth-century English history. Its focus on the mass movements that punctuated the period determines the study’s essentially urban dynamic for, as Roberts argues, these were the “epicentres” of Victorian and Edwardian England (1). There are other studies that cover similar territory, but Roberts’s text is more than a survey of the recent historiography of the nineteenth century, however helpful that might be; the author had a more ambitious project in mind. Roberts has adopted a braided narrative to deliver the book’s bold objective: to subject recent interpretations of the key political transitions of the age to rigorous and challenging scrutiny. The careful introduction makes a powerful case for the presence of a “vibrant popular political culture” in the nineteenth century, an argument that refutes the claims of those postmodernists who have insisted that the roots of political apathy can be traced back to the Victorian period. As Roberts notes, there was “more to the politics of the period than mere verbal tussle,” and he takes issue with historians of the so-called New Political History whose “linguistic determinism” has effectively denied the agency of ordinary voters (8). The opening chapter explores citizenship’s definition in a society that valued private property above all else and appraises the ways in which this ideological framework shaped the rights of individual citizens in 1832, most notably in the attachment to a householder franchise. This exploration of the “political citizen” is of central importance in demonstrating high levels of popular participation (14), and much of the book is concerned with the ways in which a voting system based on property was challenged and eventually replaced by the transition to individual voting rights. Few would deny that the Reform Acts of 1832, 1868, and 1884 were key staging posts in the progress toward an enlarged electorate and that, perversely, citizenship became a gendered concept under the terms of the Third Reform Act. As one Liberal MP maintained, citizenship should be limited “to men of the highest type” (qtd. in Roberts 25). Securing better citizenship rights lay at the heart of the Chartist campaign, and Roberts is at pains to underline the centrality of an earlier radical tradition that was strengthened by more than a decade of activism. This section is particularly adept at highlighting the complexity of radical ideas that coalesced into a mass platform of unprecedented numbers and superficially gave the appearance of uniformity under the umbrella of Chartism. Undoubtedly, internal wrangling over objectives and strategies was a factor in the movement’s failure to achieve the Six Points, but success, Roberts argues, can be measured in other ways. In establishing the state’s responsibility for the socio-economic distress of the times, the government was forced to act, even if this was strictly “on its own terms” and “not at the direct bidding of the Chartists” (43). Tensions between tradition and progress framed the difficult path to modernisation, and Roberts suggests that radicals and Chartists were just as likely as [End Page 559] anyone else to succumb to the idea of a reformed administration. Rather than replace the hierarchical structure of British society with a radical democracy, many sought only to replace the existing power structure with a leaner, less expensive monarchy and a more responsive Parliament. The deep religiosity of Victorian society inflected the Chartist movement through its cultural apparatus of hymns and rhetoric, and it too flowed into the constitutional approach that became the preferred modus operandi of most of its members. If this was...

An Empirical Examination Of The Effect Of The Section 465 At-Risk Rules On Equipment Leasing Tax Shelters

Congress enacted the at-risk rules in the Tax Reform act of 1976 to curb tax shelter abuses. It later added a recapture provision to the at-risk rules in the Revenue Act of 1978 designed to prevent taxpayers from temporarily increasing the amount at risk at year end. Tax Shelter promoters have attempted to avoid the at-risk rules through questionable interpretations of the law. This study examines various interpretations of the at-risk rules and the impact of the recapture provision. It concludes that (1) the inclusion of debt assumed in the amount at risk significantly affects the tax benefits accruing to investors whereas the inclusion of the note payable in the amount at risk does not; and (2) the recapture provision applies in many cases to equipment leasing tax shelters and operates as intended to limit tax benefits to investors.

Making the 1996 Welfare Reform Work: The Promise of a Job

Policy makers often tout the finding that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families caseloads have shrunk by 50% or more since the passage of the 1996 welfare reform act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act). Less well publicized is the economic fate of these “welfare leavers.” Extensive evidence shows that, despite the fact that as many as 60% exit with a full-time job, within a year or two approximately one half of all welfare leavers—and their children—fall into poverty. These findings predate the current severe recession; the economic status of current and past welfare leavers is undoubtedly much worse today. The proximate cause of this high rate of poverty is that welfare leavers end up working, on average, too few hours over the course of a year. Behind these low hours are the more fundamental causes of the measurable “barriers to work” limiting many leavers, and the limited supply of appropriate private-sector jobs, even during the so-called full-employment years of the late 1990s. In a search for solutions to this problem, this article examines the design, costs, and effects of a large number of job creation/welfare-to-work programs. Using these results, we propose a program of jobs of last resort called Promise of a Job (POJ). The authors outline the structure of POJ, provide costs estimates per participant and for its national implementation, and simulate its impact on poverty rates. Depending on assumptions such as the eligibility requirements and the rate at which participants are placed in full-time jobs, some simulations show dramatic reductions in the rates of adult and, especially, children's poverty.

Introducing the Health Coach at a Primary Care Practice: A Pilot Study (Part 2)

It is well known that the cost of healthcare in the United States is a poor value proposition. One of the primary goals of the healthcare reform act is to reduce cost while improving healthcare quality. The authors believe that adding a health coach helps to achieve this goal. In part I, the authors discuss the role of a health coach in the healthcare field. They present the findings from a pilot study at a primary care practice managing diabetes of patients using a health coach. The findings from the study suggest that adding a health coach helps in cost savings as well as improved health for the patients.

Conference Scene: The healthcare reform act, comparative effectiveness research and personalized medicine.

This article provides a summary report based on the presentation by Dr Elizabeth Ofili on a panel at the annual Burrill Personalized Medicine meeting, titled: Has 'Healthcare Reform' accelerated or decelerated the move to a more Personalized Medicine World? The panel moderator was Dr Edward Abrahams, President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition (Washington, DC, USA). Other panelists were: Dr Richard Barker, Director General, Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (London, UK) and Dr David Lawrence, Former Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals Inc. (CA, USA). This report describes Dr Ofili's discussion on the panel, using the Warfarin Adverse Event Reduction For Adults Receiving Genetic Testing at therapy Initiation (WARFARIN) study as a specific example of how well-designed studies can accelerate personalized medicine, by providing evidence that supports the appropriate adoption of pharmacogenetic testing in diagnosis and treatment. The WARFARIN study was recently approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under 'coverage with evidence development'.

Introducing the Health Coach at a Primary Care Practice: Impact on Quality and Cost (Part 1)

The cost of healthcare in U.S. is a poor value proposition. One of the primary goals of the healthcare reform act is to reduce cost while improving healthcare quality. We believe that adding a health coach will help in achieving this goal. The health coach is a medical professional who supports both the physician and the patient by meeting previously established goals. This research presents and analyzes the key roles of a health coach in a primary care practice.

Welfare Reform and Immigrants: Noncitizen Eligibility Restrictions, Vulnerable Immigrants, and the Social Service Providers

The welfare reform act of 1996 imposed restrictive welfare eligibility rules for noncitizens. As a result, noncitizens have more limited access to major public assistance programs than ever before. Existing studies document the dramatic impacts of these policy changes on immigrants, their communities, and service providers. Specifically, the percentages of noncitizens receiving public benefits declined sharply, reports of their hardships increased, and service providers were forced to provide additional services with fewer resources. From a long-term perspective, it is unlikely that eligibility restrictions have saved government spending and overall costs to society. These results call for policy changes on noncitizen eligibility restrictions.

The new health care reform act and Medicaid: New opportunities for psychiatric rehabilitation.

This article examines significant new opportunities presented by the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform law passed in the spring of 2010, and specifically addresses changes to the Medicaid program that may be of great benefit to individuals with severe psychiatric disabilities, as well as their relevance to the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. The authors offer an assessment of the myriad new options created by health reform, with particular emphasis on those that improve and expand services for persons with severe psychiatric disabilities in their homes and communities. Selective information is presented on the expansion of specific state options within Medicaid that, if implemented, may prove most useful for those with serious psychiatric disabilities. Material was drawn from relevant federal statutes and published literature, as well as personal observation. While the health care reform law creates many new opportunities for states to fund and provide services for persons with disabilities, the complexity of the law may present implementation challenges for state authorities, providers, advocates, and consumers alike. Those interested in learning more about the options presented in this paper and further implications of health care reform are encouraged to explore additional resources and information.

Daddy's Little Girls: On the Perils of Chastity Clubs, Purity Balls, and Ritualized Abstinence

Daddy's Little GirlsOn the Perils of Chastity Clubs, Purity Balls, and Ritualized Abstinence Breanne Fahs (bio) Introduction Recent years have seen a surge in public attention to the culture of chastity, including purity balls, chastity clubs, and other public declarations of abstinence and asexuality. Building on the welfare reform act of 1996—which introduced abstinence-only sexual education primarily as a social mechanism of control over lower-income women of color—the past eight years have ushered in a sharp increase in the visibility of and funding for abstinence-only programs targeted at young women across the spectrum of raced and classed backgrounds.1 As widespread efforts to block federal and state funding for comprehensive sexual education have succeeded, a rush of support for abstinence-only education has taken its place, despite lack of evidence for its effectiveness in delaying teenage sex, preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and promoting contraception usage. With this newfound interest in abstinence-only education, schools around the country have reported a dramatic increase in the emergence of groups on campus whose sole purpose is to support the "culture of purity." Such groups typically recruit members by appealing to their desire to please their parents, God, and their peers by resisting sexual temptation. Although girls from elementary through high school represent the majority of participants in chastity clubs, there is also a rise in the popularity of these clubs on university campuses, and Ivy League campuses in particular, in which women organize with the singular goal of protecting female purity. When speaking of the irony of sexual repression fostering sexual obsession, Foucault argued, "It is said that no society has been more prudish; never have the agencies of power taken such care to feign ignorance of the thing they prohibited, as if they were determined to have nothing to do with it. But it is the opposite that has become apparent, at least after a general review of the [End Page 116] facts: never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere."2 As such, our obsession with restraining sexual expression has led to the sex-obsessed culture of chastity, including purity balls, virginity clubs, and ritualized celibacy pledges. Although these organizations and clubs around the country are not exclusively for women, or exclusively designed by women, they overwhelmingly focus on the recruitment of young women by appealing to their collective desires to fight "the urge to merge." My central argument puts forth that this particular construction of sexuality results in a highly gendered social space that reinforces women's oppressed sociosexual status as the property of men, inadequately prepares them for negotiating the terms of their sexual health, and encourages them to seek out chastity clubs and social spaces that construct an identity based on enforced repression of sexual desire and expression. As such, issues of personal agency—for example, the extent to which women choose or, alternatively, are pushed into these social spaces—represent a crucial problem in the culture of chastity, one I will address here in detail. This article includes four sections that collectively examine the social spaces in which chastity is rewarded, nurtured, and publicly flaunted. As an outline of the major points covered in this piece, I first examine the social meaning of chastity rituals, including their effects on women's sexual socialization, ideologies of sexual violence, and their relationship to "losing" virginity. The central claim in this first section is that the gendered space of chastity clubs encourages women to adopt the worldview that women are distinctly and essentially different from men and that sexuality is itself dangerous, resulting in, for example, the construction of sexual violence as "giving in" to temptation. Second, I examine the perils and dangers of the culture of chastity, including a survey of recent studies that show increased sexual risk-taking among women who have joined chastity clubs, as well as an analysis of the relationship between traditionalist religious teachings and young women's sexual behavior. When only the most...

Auswirkungen der deutschen Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 und der österreichischen Gruppenbesteuerung auf den grenzüberschreitenden Unternehmenserwerb

Anhand eines einfachen Modells unter Sicherheit zur Bewertung von Kapitalgesellschaften wird gezeigt, wie sich die Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 in Deutschland und die Einfuhrung der Gruppenbesteuerung in Osterreich in 2005 auf die Kaufer- und Verkaufergrenzpreise bei grenzuberschreitendem Erwerb von Kapitalgesellschaften auswirken. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass trotz der Einfuhrung der Gruppenbesteuerung ein osterreichischer Investor keinen hoheren Grenzpreis fur eine osterreichische Kapitalgesellschaft zahlen kann als sein deutscher Konkurrent. Ein deutscher Investor kann sowohl auf dem osterreichischen als auch auf dem deutschen Markt fur Unternehmenstransaktionen einen hoheren Preis zahlen. Dieses Verhaltnis kehrt sich durch die Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 in Deutschland um. Nun kann der osterreichische Investor in Osterreich einen hoheren Preis zahlen; beim Erwerb einer deutschen Kapitalgesellschaft hangt die Vorteilhaftigkeit von dem Ausschuttungsverhalten ab. Durch die Einfuhrung der Abgeltungsteuer steigt die Renditeforderung des deutschen Investors und seine Zahlungsbereitschaft sinkt. So wirkt sich die Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 trotz eines sinkenden Korperschaftsteuersatzes stark negativ auf die Wettbewerbsposition eines deutschen Erwerbers einer Kapitalgesellschaft aus.

Educational reforms in Nigeria: The potentials of information and communication technology (ICT)

The Nigerian educational reform act of 2007 provides information on wide ranging reforms for the country’s education sector. While the conceptual ideas and provisions are laudable, the issue of implementation becomes a matter of concern. This theoretical paper examines the potentials of information and communication technology in the implementation of the reforms. It explores the basic concepts of educational reforms, the nature of the reform, the implementation of previous education reform programmes, and information and communication technology (ICT) in the Nigerian school curriculum. The paper concludes on the need to systematically use ICT to implement the Nigerian educational reforms Key words: Reforms, Nigerian educational reforms, information and communication technology, evaluation of reforms.

‘The Sword of Avenging Justice’: Politics in Sutherland after the Third Reform Act

AbstractThere has been much historical debate over the role of aristocratic landed families in local and national politics throughout the nineteenth century, and the impact of the First, Second and Third Reform Acts on that role. Additionally, the period from 1881 in the Scottish Highlands was one of acute political and ideological crisis, as the debate over the reform of the Land Laws took a violent turn, and Highland landowners were forced to address the demands of their small tenants. This article addresses these debates, taking as its case-study the ducal house of Sutherland. The Leveson-Gower family owned almost the whole county of Sutherland and until 1884 dominated political life in the region. This article examines the gradual breakdown of that political power, in line with a more general decline in financial and territorial influence, both in terms of the personal role of the Fourth and Fifth Dukes of Sutherland, and the broader impact of the estate management on the mechanics and expectations of politics in the county.

Effects of German Reform of the Company Taxation 2008 and the Austrian Group Taxation on the Transnational Enterprise Acquisition (Auswirkungen der deutschen Unternehmensteuerreform 2008 und der oesterreichischen Gruppenbesteuerung auf den grenzueberschreitenden Unternehmenserwerb)

Using a simple model under certainty we show the implications of the new group relief system in Austria effective from 2005 and the reform act of business taxation 2008 in Germany on cross border marginal purchase prices and marginal seller prices concerning incorporations. The results show that the new group relief in Austria does not imply a higher marginal purchase price for a subsidiary located in Austria by an Austrian investor in comparison to his German competitor. If the German reform act of business taxation 2008 is not taken into account a German investor is able to pay higher marginal prices at the Austrian and German transaction market for companies. Considering the German tax reform act the situation changes. Now the Austrian investor is able to pay higher marginal prices for subsidiaries located in Germany and Austria.

Reform of the Private Limited Company Act and codification of the private international law of companies in Germany

Presumably in November of this year German corporate and insolvency law will undergo substantial changes. This article describes the most important changes introduced by the relevant act (“Gesetz zur Modernisierung des GmbH-Rechts und zur Bekämpfung von Missbräuchen”, MoMiG) and its consequences. The focus of the article is on the international aspects of the reform act.

THE POLITICS OF REFORM AND THE MAKING OF THE SECOND REFORM ACT, 1848–1867

ABSTRACTThe second reform act came at the close of a remarkable period of constitutional debate, in which seven different governments had committed themselves to reform. Yet historians have shown little interest in this debate, seeing it as largely irrelevant to the making of the second reform act. This article seeks to reconnect the discussions of the 1850s with the measure of 1867, and to explore some of the issues that shaped the course of legislation. It argues that the failure to achieve reform in the 1850s was the result not of hostility to reform in the abstract, but of an inability to agree on the type of reform that was desirable. Depending on who was enfranchised and where, different reform bills could produce quite different electorates, making consensus elusive. The article shows how the Liberal opposition to the 1866 bill was fuelled by concerns over the nature of Liberal politics after Palmerston, and concludes that the disagreement over the rating franchise concealed a wider disagreement on the whole nature of reform, exerting a powerful influence on the measures of both 1866 and 1867.

Labor supply, deadweight loss and tax reform act of 1986: A nonparametric evaluation using panel data

Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA 1986) has provided an invaluable source of variation in tax rates to study the effects of tax reforms on labor supply in the US. Most existing studies exploiting variation generated by TRA 1986 have used cross-sectional variation in tax rates or assumed a linear labor supply function or have not couched their analysis in a nonlinear budget set framework. This paper uses the drastic variation in the budget set induced by TRA 1986 as a source of identification and combines two novel approaches to estimate behavioral effects of tax reforms. I first use nonparametric estimation methods with nonlinear budget sets [Blomquist, Sören, Newey, W., 2002. Nonparametric estimation with nonlinear budget sets. Econometrica 70 (6), 2455–2480] to estimate a labor supply function, using waves of PSID just before and after TRA 1986. Nonparametric method developed in Hausman and Newey [Hausman, J., Whitney Newey, 1995. Nonparametric measurement of exact consumer's surplus and deadweight loss. Econometrica 63, 1145–76] is then applied to estimate the deadweight loss from TRA 1986. The nonparametric estimate of the compensated wage elasticity is 0.22. I find that TRA 1986 had a small but positive effect on labor supply of men of about 2% at the sample mean. TRA 1986 was associated with robust reduction in deadweight loss from the pre-TRA 1986 level and this reduction is positively correlated with income and wages.