In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should...

This paper studies how society votes on the payroll taxes of a basic income and a social health insurance scheme. Individuals differ along the two most important dimensions when it comes to the design of the two welfare schemes, namely, income and risk. Even though the introduction of a basic...

We derive a sufficient statistics optimal income tax formula in a general model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages, to study the shape of the tax and transfer system at the bottom of the income distribution. The sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation...

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...

Recent estimates of the marginal cost of public funds differ substantially. Some studies argue that the efficiency cost of taxation counter the welfare gain connected to redistribution of income. Hence, the efficiency cost of taxation should not be included as a cost of public goods provision....

Wage subsidies can be provided directly to the worker, as in the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program. They can also be provided indirectly by subsidizing the employer; by reducing the cost of labor, employers are induced to offer higher wages. The standard literature stipulates that...

We assess the concentration and duration of zero tax liabilities and of transfer receipts, using data for households with ten to forty years of observations from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. We find that neither is strongly concentrated. Nearly 68% owe no federal tax in at least one...

There is a strong intergenerational correlation in welfare participation, but this does not imply that parental welfare receipt induces child receipt. While there are a few quasi-experimental studies that provide estimates of the causal effect of parental welfare participation for children from...

We analyze the effect of means-tested benefits on annuitization decisions. Most industrialized countries provide a subsistence level consumption floor in old age, usually in the form of means-tested benefits. The availability of such means-tested payments creates an incentive to cash out...

We study the role of social long term care (LTC) insurance when income taxation and private insurance markets are imperfect. Policy instruments include public provision of LTC as well as a subsidy on private insurance. The subsidy scheme may be linear or nonlinear. For the linear part we...