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...

Income inequality in Colombia has declined since the early 2000s but remains very high by international standards. While most of the inequality originates from the labour market, wealth – and thus capital income – is also highly concentrated and the tax and transfer system has little...

This paper provides, for all OECD countries, an estimate of the net tax cost per currency unit of contribution to a tax-favoured retirement savings plan, using a present-value methodology. The latter takes into account the future flows of revenues foregone on accrued income and of revenues...

With increasing globalisation of knowledge, there are increased opportunities to 'learn' from the experience of policy interventions elsewhere. This paper presents evidence on the extent of international convergence in public policy, with particular focus on labour, welfare, savings and...

In August 2013, two child care reforms have come into effect at the same time: First, a legal claim to formal child care has been introduced for all children aged one year or older. Second, a new benefit called Betreuungsgeld has been introduced that is granted to families who do not use public...

We specify and estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement and savings decisions of single-adult and couple households. Drawing on our model, we study the interplay between family labor supply and public insurance mechanisms. By including family labor supply, we...

One central lesson of the sovereign debt crisis is that the Eurozone (and the EU) needs institutional reform. Many observers argue that the monetary union should be complemented by a fiscal union . In this paper we provide the first quantitative analysis of important economic effects of an EU...

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:...

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...