Social welfare effects of tax-benefit reform under endogenous participation and unemployment
This paper analyzes the effects of tax-benefit reforms in a framework integrating endogenous labor supply and unemployment. There is a discrete distribution of individuals’ productivities and labor supply decisions are limited to the participation decision. Unemployment is modeled in a search and matching framework with individual wage bargaining. We adopt an ordinal approach to social welfare comparisons and explore numerically various reform policies. For Switzerland, a participation income is shown to be an “uncontroversial” tax reform, improving social welfare according to any social welfare criterion displaying inequality aversion.