The purpose of the present paper is to examine the effects of taxation on income distribution in a model with efficiency wages and involuntary unemployment. Central to the efficiency-wage theory is the hypothesis that firms may set wages above market-clearing levels, whenever the productivity of...

Measures aimed at reducing the tax burden on labour have been advocated to alleviate the EU unemployment problem. Most of the analyses document a relationship between the unemployment rate and the tax burden on labour. Hence, it is not possible to discern whether the effect on unemployment...

The comparison of different tax schedules is a problem of high dimensionality. In the current paper it is proved that under very general assumptions a utilitarian welfare function and an inequality index compose a sufficient statistic for the after-tax welfare distribution, reducing...

Macro-based summary indicators of effective tax burdens cannot provide information on the level or distribution of the marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in effective tax rates facing different subgroups of the population....

This paper investigates the feasibility of measuring the efficacy of programs designed to move welfare recipients into jobs using administrative records on individual program participation linked with state records on individual earnings. Like many states, Missouri collects quarterly earnings...

In earlier literature, the suggested Pareto improvements in pay-as-you- go (PAYG) systems have relied on the presence of externalities or the possibility of intragenerational redistribution. We show that neither assumption is necessary in an economy with intergenerational trade in a fixed factor...

The reconstruction of the international order after World War I put great emphasis on social reforms through the International Labor Organization (ILO). Three types of arguments were used to promote social reform. The first asserted that international economic competition meant that social...

It has been noted that failure to meet the target set by government for reducing the head count ratio of child poverty in Britain is partly due to the success of government policy in generating economic growth. Apart from missing the argument that absolute poverty is not a meaningful idea, this...

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...

This paper contributes to providing insights into the impact of decentralisation on poverty. It starts out with an overview of which role decentralisation plays in strategies and policies for poverty eradication and derives economic and political impact channels. It concentrates on the economic...