This essay revisits certain basic features of tax systems as they relate to redistribution. It focuses on how the actual differences between proportional and graduated taxes with regard to redistribution diverge in important ways from what many believe or implicitly assume. The analysis seeks to...

New Zealand panel data, which provide extensive information on the benefit histories of parents and their children, are used to estimate an intergenerational correlation coefficient in social welfare dependency. Recent estimation techniques for addressing issues of measurement error are applied...

The purpose of this report is to document the scale of uncovered employment in Brazil and to describe the trends in this phenomenon at least since the transition to democracy in the late 1980s. Micro-data obtained from annual Brazilian household surveys from 1992 onwards are used to model the...

Welfare dependence or reliance is widely regarded to have adverse consequences for both the community and welfare recipients, yet there have been few studies of the extent and nature of welfare reliance. Indeed, the concept of welfare reliance does not seem to be well defined. In the present...

Being economically well established, the member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have unique social insurance schemes. Based on the defined benefit principle, they have succeeded in creating large reserves, which are managed and invested independently by the social insurance...

We give an account of an overlapping-generations experiment with multiple families in which voluntary transfers can take the form of support to the elderly or grants to children. Support to the old is a purely intergenerational (intra-family) transfer, whereas grants to children also involve an...

This paper estimates the effects of welfare reforms on a state's employment and wage rates. Welfare reforms include: pushing welfare recipients into the labor force, financial incentives to recipients for working, wage subsidies to employers of recipients, and community service jobs for...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: A core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...