Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

Pension policy reforms across the world in recent decades are a reaction to the changing demographic and socioeconomic environment. While pension scheme redesign has received much attention, the tax treatment of contributions, returns, and benefits of retirement savings remains mostly unattended...

There is a rising share of individuals spending at least some part of their working life abroad and acquiring pension rights. While the portability of pensions and other social benefits has received some analytical attention over the recent decade there is currently limited analytical guidance...

The semi-dual income tax typically combines a progressive tax schedule for labour and pension income with low and often flat and differentiated nominal tax rates on some forms of capital income. This paper discusses the rationale for the adoption of semi-dual income tax in the taxation of...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels of...

In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom that due to the negative correlation between family size and earning ability, family size can be used as a 'tagging' device, and calls for subsidizing children (via child allowances) to enhance egalitarian objectives. We show that the case for...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

In this paper we employ a tax-competition model to demonstrate that in the presence of migration the re-distributive advantage of a non-linear income tax system over a linear (flat) one is significantly mitigated relative to the autarky (no-migration) equilibrium. When migration threats are...

This paper develops a Mirrlees (1971) framework with heterogeneous agents to analyze optimal redistributive taxes, optimal provision of public goods and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). Standard MCF measures are shown to suffer from three defects: i) The MCF for the (non-individualized)...

We examine fiscal adjustment episodes in 24 OECD countries in order to find how austerity affects debt and growth, and whether the choice of fiscal instrument matters for the results. Influential existing studies argue that spending cuts are more likely to successfully reduce debt and enhance...