We develop a model where workers may enter self-employment or search for jobs as employees and where there is heterogeneity across workers' managerial ability. Workers with higher skills will manage larger firms while workers with low managerial ability will run smaller firms and will be in...

This paper examines the impact on inequality and poverty of the economic crisis in four European countries, namely France, Germany, the UK and Ireland, and the contribution of tax and benefit policy changes. The period examined, 2008 to 2010, was one of great economic turmoil, yet it is unclear...

The paper investigates the impact of remittances on the relative concerns of households in rural China. Using the Rural to Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) dataset we estimate a series of well-being functions to simultaneously explore the relative concerns with respect to income and remittances....

Subjective well-being (SWB) is increasingly used as a way to measure individual well-being. Interpreted as "experienced utility", it has been compared to "decision utility" using specific experiments (Kahneman et al., 1997) or stated preferences (Benjamin et al. 2012). We suggest here an...

With the increase in national debts, pay freezes are imposed for several years in the public sector of some countries, at the risk of decreasing the quality of public services. Since public wage setting policies should account for relevant comparisons with the private sector, we provide novel...

Redistributive systems in Africa are still in their infancy but are constantly expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. This paper aims at characterizing the redistributive potential of six African countries: Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa. These...

There is a huge variation in the size of labor supply elasticities in the literature, which hampers policy analysis. While recent studies show that preference heterogeneity across countries explains little of this variation, we focus on two other important features: observation period and...

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful tax benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function - typically inequality or poverty...

This paper applies recent developments in collective model estimation to elicit the household resource sharing rule, i.e. the amount of household resources accruing to fathers, mothers, and their children among African families in South Africa. We use the 2010/11 South African Income and...

Subjective well-being (SWB) data is increasingly used to perform welfare analyses. Interpreted as 'experienced utility', SWB has recently been compared to 'decision utility' using specific experiments, most often based on stated preferences. Results point to an overall congruence between these...