Purpose The purpose of this paper is to calculate the subjective equivalence scale and poverty rates for Poland and compare them to equivalence scales in Eastern and Western Europe. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions...

In order to study whether public pension systems displace private saving, we use the quasi-experimental variation in pension wealth created by Poland’s 1999 pension reform. Using the 1997–2003 Polish Household Budget Surveys, we begin by estimating “difference-in-differences”...

Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from 12 countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four- to five-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative...

A widely shared intuition holds that individual control over money matters for the decision process within the household and the subsequent distribution of resources and welfare. As a consequence, there are good reasons to depart from the unitary model of the household and to explore the...

This paper proposes a comparison of the results of tax policy analysis obtained on the basis of unitary and collective representations of the household. We first generate labour supplies consistent with the collective rationality, by use of a model calibrated on microdata as described in...

We suggest a methodology to calibrate a collective model with household-specific bargaining rules and marriage-specific preferences that incorporate leisure externalities. The empirical identification relies on the assumption that some aspects of individual preferences remain the same after...