The Norwegian pension reform of 2006 intends to (1) improve long run fiscal sustainability by reducing the growth in public old-age expenditures, (2) strengthen labour supply incentives, and (3) maintain the main redistributive features of the present system. We assess to what extent the reform...

This paper aims at clarifying the notion "overall distributive effect" of an income component or a policy proposal and moreover discusses various approaches for assessing the distributional impact of the components of total income. We pay particular attention to the problem of evaluating the...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation of how local public in-kind benefits affect the distribution of income in Norway. To this end, a method that accounts for differences between municipalities in capacity to produce the same standard of public services is used for assessing the...

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of including the value of public health care, longterm care, education and childcare on estimates of income inequality and financial poverty in 23 European countries. The valuation of public services and the identification of target groups rely on...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services in distributional analysis, there is little reliable evidence on how the inclusion of such non-cash income actually affects poverty and inequality estimates. In particular, the equivalence scales applied to...

The main goal of the Norwegian pension reform of 2011 is to improve long run fiscal sustainability, not least through stronger labour supply incentives. We assess to what extent the reform is likely to live up to these intentions. To this end we combine a dynamic microsimulation model, which...

This paper compares income inequality and income mobility in the Scandinavian countries and the United States during the 1980s. The results demonstrate that inequality is greater in the United states than in the Scandinavian countries and that the ranking of countries with respect to inequality...