Mircrosimulation models (MSM) and Computable General Equilibrium models (CGE) have both been widely used in policy analysis. The combination of these two model types allows the utilisation of the advantages of both types. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

How do different components of the tax and transfer systems affect disposable income inequality? This paper explores the redistributive effects of different tax benefit instruments in the enlarged EU based on two approaches. Inequality analysis based on the standard approach suggests that...

This paper describes IZA[psi]MOD, the policy microsimulation model of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). The model uses household microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and firm data from the German linked employer-employee dataset LIAB. IZA[psi]MOD consists of three...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...

Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely comparable across countries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison of elasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and the period of...

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardesthit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

Previous reviews of static labor supply estimations concentrate mainly on the evidence from the 1980s and 1990s, Anglo-Saxon countries and early generations of labor supply modeling. This paper provides a fresh characterization of steady-state labor supply elasticities for Western Europe and the...