Who Benefits from the Child Tax Credit?

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) provides cash transfers to millions of families in the United States. We examine the distributional effects of the rules governing the credit, focusing on the rules governing years prior to 2021. We document striking disparities in eligibility by income and race. For instance, three-quarters of white children are eligible for the full CTC, compared with only about half of Black and Hispanic children. We estimate the distributional effects of a range of reforms to the CTC eligibility rules, demonstrating how such reforms could more evenly distribute the credit by race and income.