The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supplymodel. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcarecosts and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considerspurely Pareto improving...

This paper focuses on the links between informal care provision and labour market activity atthe sub-national level. Within-country analysis of this issue has been very limited to datedespite the wide regional variations in informal care provision that often exist. This issue isimportant in the...

Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely comparable acrosscountries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison ofelasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and theperiod of investigation....

We investigate spillovers in spousal labour supply exploiting independent variation in hoursworked generated by the introduction of the shorter workweek in France in the late 1990s.We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce theirweekly labour supply by...

Most empirical studies on the impact of labour income taxation on the labour supplybehaviour of households use a unitary modelling approach. In this paper we empiricallyanalyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collectiveapproach for household behaviour and the...

Discrete-choice models of labor supply have become very popular for ex ante evaluations ofpolicy reforms as they easily account for non-convex budget sets. We test the constraintsimposed in practice on these models and suggest a fully flexible model that significantlyimproves fit....

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...

This paper studies the optimal trade-off between commitment and flexibility in an intertemporal consumption/savings choice model. Individuals expect to receive relevant information regarding their own situation and tastes - generating a value for flexibility - but also expect to suffer from...

How far is the US social insurance system from an efficient system? We answer this question within a model where agents receive idiosyncratic, labor-productivity shocks that are privately observed. When social security and income taxation comprise the social insurance system, the maximum...