Nick Turner is a Financial Economist in the Office of Tax Analysis at the United
States Treasury. Nick's research focuses on the behavioral responses to government
policies. His research on tax incentives for higher education explores how students,
parents and institutions of higher learning respond to tax-based federal student aid. His
recent work on postsecondary education explores the returns from for-profit attendance
and the impact of new federal student aid restrictions from the "gainful
employment" rule. 

Nick earned a BS from Penn State, a MPP and MA (economics) from Georgetown University and
a PhD (economics) from UCSD. Previously, Nick worked at the New England Public Policy
Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Higher Education

Why Don't Taxpayers Maximize their Tax-Based Student Aid? Salience and Inertia in Program Selection, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy (2012)

Tax-based federal student aid is designed to increase postsecondary attendance and ease the financial burden...

 

For-Profit College Entry and Not-for-Profit Enrollment: Crowding out or crowding in? (2012)

Exploiting the rapid expansion of the for-profit sector between 2002 and 2010, I explore how...

 

Link

Who Benefits from Student Aid? The Economic Incidence of Tax-Based Federal Student Aid, Economics of Education Review (2012)

Federal benefit programs, including federal student aid, are designed to aid targeted populations. Behavioral responses...

 

Link

THE EFFECT OF TAX-BASED FEDERAL STUDENT AID ON COLLEGE ENROLLMENT, National Tax Journal (2011)

Tax-based federal student aid — the Hope Tax Credit, Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, and Tuition...

 

Do Students Profit from For-Profit Education? Estimating the Returns to Postsecondary Education with Tax Data (2011)

I use administrative panel data on earnings and educational attendance from the Internal Revenue Service...

 

Federal Tax Policy

OpenURL

Income Inequality, Mobility, and Turnover at the Top in the US, 1987–2010, American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings) (2013)
 

Link

THE DISTRIBUTIONAL AND REVENUE CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMING THE MORTGAGE INTEREST DEDUCTION (with Adam Cole and Geoffrey Gee), National Tax Journal (2011)

The mortgage interest deduction (MID) is costly, and half the benefits accrue to the top...

 

State Tax Policy

Link

Fiscal Capacity in State Fiscal Year 1999 (with Robert Tannenwald), State Tax Notes (2005)

This paper compares states in terms of their relative fiscal capacity, fiscal need, fiscal comfort,...