This paper presents an approach for the estimation of welfare effects of tax policy changes under heterogeneity in consumer preferences. The approach is applied to evaluate the welfare effects of current tax advantages for electric vehicles supplied as fringe benefits by employers. Drawing on...

According to Canadian taxfiler data, over the last thirty years there has been a surge in the income shares of the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01% of income recipients, even with longitudinal smoothing by individual using three- or five-year moving averages. Top shares fell in 2008 and 2009, but...

This research attempts to figure out whether the wage distributions of Canadian wage earners have been moving towards or away from the flowing three ideals in the early part of the 21th century. First, there be a pattern of wage increase that is shared by a large majority of wage earners....

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions – the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households’ propensities to save in...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada’s – couples with the same...

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada’s – couples with the same...

In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits...

Increasing mothers’ labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

This paper examines the impact of a change in the German child benefit system in 1996, which led to a large increase in lump sum transfers to families with children.We analyze the impact on the labor force participation of family members. Comparing behavioral changes of adults with children with...

The Canadian federal tax reform of 1988 replaced a spousal tax exemption with a non-refundable tax credit. This reduced the "jointness" of the tax system: after the reform, secondary earners' effective "first dollar" marginal tax rates no longer depended on the marginal tax rates of their...