We analyze the effects of three alternative proposals to reform the taxation of families relative to the current German system of joint taxation of couples and child allowances: a French-type family splitting and two full family splitting proposals. The empirical analysis of the effects of these...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...

We examine the allocation of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities across three sector groups, one that produces goods without home substitutes, and two others that have home substitutes but are treated differently by welfare policy. We attribute...

This paper empirically investigates distributional and welfare effects of Germany's year 2000 tax reform. The reform is simulated in an ex-ante behavioral microsimulation approach. Dead weight loss of capital income taxation is estimated in a structural model for household savings and asset...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

What would be the aggregate effects of adopting a more generous and universal childcare subsidy program in the U.S.? We answer this question in a life-cycle equilibrium model with heterogeneous married and single households with three key features: (i) joint labor-supply of married households...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

Intertemporal shifting of wage income takes place when income earned in one tax year is paid out in another tax year in order to save taxes. Shifting has implications for the evaluation of the distortionary and distributional effects of taxes and may cause serious bias in empirical estimates of...

Complementary to microsimulation studies focusing on the impact of labor supply as a choice of hours worked we shed light on another variable that survey data are not capable of taking into account: the choice of work e ffort. Our aim is to investigate the eff ect of individual and joint...

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support play a role in explaining this variation. I analyse two types of policies:...