The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed "redistributive effect" for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

To what extent can a country’s effectiveness in reducing child poverty be attributed to the size of family cash transfers (i.e. both benefits and tax advantages) or to their design? In this paper, we disentangle the importance of each of these two factors, focusing on the family support...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

Governments introducing output parameters in the funding rule of universities believe that it will induce universities to raise their teaching efforts while educational standards will remain unaffected. We show that this presupposes positive interaction effects between students’ abilities,...

This article introduces the idea of a childcare time benefit that reconciles three ambitions: to reach a high level of labour market participation, to revalue parental childcare time and to enhance the freedom to choose in the reconciliation of work and family life. The proposed benefit is based...

This paper looks at the impact of citizenship acquisition on the labour market positions of immigrants in Belgium. Citizenship is open to all immigrants with a sufficient period of legal residence, without any language or integration requirements. In that respect, this study is an important...

At the European level and in most EU member states, higher employment levels are seen as key to better poverty outcomes. But what can we expect the actual impact to be? Up until now shift-share analysis has been used to estimate the impact of rising employment on relative income poverty. This...

Recent studies find in-work poverty to be a pan-European phenomenon. Yet in-work poverty has come to the fore as a policy issue only recently in most continental European countries. Policies implemented in the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably in-work benefit schemes, are much...

Distributional analyses mainly focus on inequality of cash incomes. However, it can be argued that also the benefits households derive from publicly provided services should be taken into account. In this article we focus on the distribution effects of the two major categories of publicly...

This paper analyses how maternal labor supply responds to the price and availability of childcare services. It focuses in particular on the childcare market of Flanders, which is characterised by above average childcare use, a wide variety of price schemes and suppliers, and strong government...