An essential difference between the design of the Swedish and the US in-work tax credit systems relates to their functional forms. Where the US earned income tax credit (EITC) is phased out and favours low and medium earnings, the Swedish system is not phased out and offers 17 and 7 per cent tax...

The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules under the constraint of fixed tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumption-leisure preferences for singles and couples as...

During the last two decades, the discrete-choice modelling of labour supply decisions has become increasingly popular, starting with Aaberge et al. (1995) and van Soest (1995). Within the literature adopting this approach there are however two potentially important issues that are worthwhile...

Improving the distributional impact of transfers may be costly if it reduces labour supply. In this paper we show how effects of changes in the design of the child benefit programme can be examined by deriving information from behavioural and non-behavioural simulations on micro data. The direct...

This paper looks at the evolution of the labour markets in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since the beginning of transition (in some respects since 1996/1998) until 2003, with a particular focus on labour force participation. How did labour supply in the Baltic countries respond to changes in...