Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely comparable acrosscountries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison ofelasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and theperiod of investigation....

Discrete-choice models of labor supply have become very popular for ex ante evaluations ofpolicy reforms as they easily account for non-convex budget sets. We test the constraintsimposed in practice on these models and suggest a fully flexible model that significantlyimproves fit....

By inverting Saez (2002)’s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize theredistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal)social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time andshow great stability despite...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improvesocial welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost ofthe variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the netwelfare benefit of...

This paper examines how a change in the generosity of one social assistance programgenerates spillovers onto other social assistance programs. We exploit an age discontinuityin the stringency of the 1993 Dutch disability reforms to estimate the causal effect of exit fromdisability insurance (DI)...

This paper focuses on the links between informal care provision and labour market activity atthe sub-national level. Within-country analysis of this issue has been very limited to datedespite the wide regional variations in informal care provision that often exist. This issue isimportant in the...

The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supplymodel. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcarecosts and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considerspurely Pareto improving...

We investigate spillovers in spousal labour supply exploiting independent variation in hoursworked generated by the introduction of the shorter workweek in France in the late 1990s.We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce theirweekly labour supply by...

Most empirical studies on the impact of labour income taxation on the labour supplybehaviour of households use a unitary modelling approach. In this paper we empiricallyanalyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collectiveapproach for household behaviour and the...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how households’ taxliabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts onthe distributions of average and marginal taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxespaid and income,...