In-work transfers are often seen as a good trade-off between redistribution and efficiency, as they alleviate poverty among low-wage households while increasing financial incentives to work. The present study explores the consequences of ex- tending these transfers in Ireland, where support for...

While financial incentives usually have a significant effect on the labor supply of married women and single mothers, the evidence about the participation elasticity of childless singles, and single males especially, is more scant. This is, however, important in countries like France and...

How the income of "relevant others" affects well-being has received renewed interest in the recent literature using subjective data. Migrants constitutes a par- ticularly interesting group to study this question: as they changed environment, they are likely to be concerned by several potential...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting specific individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage less...

Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely com- parable across countries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison of elasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and the period of...

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...

For policy makers and analysts, it is important to isolate the redistributive im- pact of tax-benefit policy changes from changes in the environment in which policies operate. When actual reforms are motivated by work incentives, it is also crucial to evaluate behavioural responses and the...

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently compa- rable over time and show great stability despite...

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...