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 the...

This paper presents an evaluation of the tax-transfer treatment of married couples in 15 EU countries using the EUROMOD microsimulation model. First, we show that many tax-transfer schemes in Europe feature negative jointness defined as a situation where the tax rate on one person depends...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in 14 member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and ?nanced by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The ?rst reform distributes the additional tax...

This paper analyses how inflation-induced erosions of nominally defined amounts built into relevant tax rules (“bracket creep”) alter distributional and revenue-generating properties of income taxes and social insurance contributions. Using a multi-country tax-benefit model, it provides...

Macro-based summary indicators of effective tax burdens cannot provide information on the level or distribution of the marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in effective tax rates facing different subgroups of the population....

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...

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...

Macro-based effective tax rate (ETR) measures do not provide information on the level or distribution of marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in average ETRs facing different population sub-groups. I use EUROMOD, an EU-wide...

Tax-benefit microsimulation models are frequently used to analyse the distributional, budgetary and behavioural effects of social and fiscal policies in a period t* using data from some previous period that have been adjusted (“aged”) to approximate the population in period t*. This paper...