The OECD’s “Average-Wage” (AW) concept is commonly used as a benchmark for tax-benefit and pension modeling. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether it is possible to use richer sets of earnings data in order to customize these modeling exercises to the situation of different...

Childcare policies play a crucial role in helping parents reconcile care and employmentrelated tasks. This paper quantifies the net cost of purchasing full-time centre-based childcare in OECD countries taking into account a wide range of influences on household budgets, including fees charged by...

The Brazilian government raises taxes amounting to 35% of GDP and spends more than two thirds of this on social programmes. These shares are in pair with the OECD averages and well in excess of Latin America averages. However, while tax-benefit systems in most OECD countries reduce income...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countries that are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognised that they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men on average under...

This paper considers the methodology of measuring replacement rates, comparing simulation based approaches, which simulate replacement rates for a representative sample of the population, with other approaches that simulate replacement rates for "typical" families or are entirely based on...

Computing the tax-benefit position of similar "typical" households across countries is a method widely used in comparative fiscal- and social policy research. These calculations provide convenient summary pictures of certain aspects of tax-benefit systems. They can, however, be seriously...

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 hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle mechanical effects due to changes in pre-tax incomes from direct effects of policy reforms. While tax reforms implemented under Democrat administrations, in...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle mechanical effects due to changes in pre-tax incomes from direct effects of policy reforms. While tax reforms implemented under Democrat administrations, in...

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among “non-elderly” households has widened during most phases of...