The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is unique among income transfer programs in that it is explicitly designed to provide income support while at the same time avoiding labor supply disincentives.  Two key design features that promote labor force participation are that the credit is not available to individuals who did not have earned income during the tax year, and that the amount of the credit phases in with each dollar earned (at 40 cents per $1 earned for a filer with two children in 2012) until a maximum benefit ($5,236 for a filer with two children in 2012) is reached.  Consistent with this design, there is an abundance of evidence that the EITC has significantly increased labor force participation in the general population, particularly for single mothers (Eissa and Liebman, 1996; Ellwood, 2000; Meyer and Rosenbaum, 2000; Grogger, 2003; Cancian and Levinson, 2006; Hotz and Scholz, 2006). 

 To date, there has been very little research that examines how vulnerable groups other than single mothers respond to the incentives generated by the EITC.  One group that is characterized by low income, low labor force participation and is of concern to policymakers is the population with disabilities.  In 2011[RAB1] , the median annual labor earnings of workers with disabilities in the United States was $11,800, compared to $32,000 for their non-disabled counterparts.  In the same year, the labor force participation rates were 18.6 percent and 77.5 percent, respectively.  Furthermore, the labor force participation rate of people with disabilities has fallen substantially the last three decades (Houtenville and Ruiz, 2012; Weathers and Wittenburg, 2009). Any increase in labor supply of people with disabilities that may have been generated by either the federal EITC explanation of the mid-1990s or the state EITC expansions of the past twenty years are likely to have been masked in aggregate trends by these other factors. 

In order to determine what, if any effect, the EITC has on the employment of people with disabilities, we exploit variation over time in the adoption of state-level earned income tax credits.  During the 1980s, states began to add their own supplements, set as fixed percentages of the federal EITC, and ranging from 5 percent to almost 50 percent of the federal credit. By 2012, 25 states and the District of Columbia had their own EITC, with maximum annual refundable credits ranging from $2,528 in Wisconsin to $209 in Louisiana.  We merge state-level EITC parameters onto a pooled cross-section of data from the CPS covering the 1990 to 2012 period.  Our preliminary results indicate that EITC expansions do not appear to increase employment for women with disabilities.  The most likely explanation is that the design of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) offsets the most salient benefits of the EITC.  We do find significant employment reductions for low-skill women to be associated with higher state SSI benefits.