We report estimates of a version of the Random Utility and Random Opportunity (RURO) model of job choice (Aaberge, Dagsvik and Strøm, 1995, and Aaberge, Colombino and Strøm, 1999) on Belgian data (SILC 2007). The paper exploits the distinction between preference factors and individual...

Fleurbaey, Hagnere and Trannoy (2003) develop a bounded dominance test to make robust welfare comparisons, which is intermediate between Ebert's (1999) cardinal dominance criterion - generalized Lorenz dominance applied to household incomes, divided and weighted by an equivalence scale - and...

We revisit the well-known decomposition of the Gini coefficient into betweengroups, within-groups and overlap terms in the context of two groups in which the incomes in one group may be scaled and that group's population weight modified. In this more general setting than usual, we focus on the...

Assessing the price evolution of houses on the basis of average sales prices, as is current practice in Belgium, might be misleading due to changing characteristics of the houses sold in the periods observed. A hedonic index which takes into account changes in characteristics is more...

The adverse distributional effects of a flat tax are well known and have been documented by empirical research in several countries, including Belgium. Advocates of the flat tax argue, correctly, that these studies do not take into account agents' behavioural reactions and possible feed back...

In this paper we use a sample of administrative data coming from the 'Dataware-house labour market and social protection' and the microsimulation model MIMOSIS to assess the labour supply effects of a reform of the rules for cumulating labour income with survival pension as proposed in the...

We analyse the distributional impact of lowering social security contributions and compensating the revenue loss by an increase in indirect taxes. We empirically assess the distributional consequences of this shift by using two Belgian microsimulation models: MODEacute;TEacute; for the tax benefit...