Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Rapid urbanization could have positive and negative health effects, such that the net impact on population health is not obvious. It is, however, highly pertinent to the human welfare consequences of development. This paper uses community and individual level longitudinal data from the China...

This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

In this paper we offer a meta-analysis approach to (simulation) studies on environmental tax reform (ETR). The underlying studies look both at environmental effects (e.g. reduction in CO2 emission) and economic effects (e.g. change in gross domestic product) following such a tax reform. The...

This paper examines the effects of taxation on long-run growth in a two-sector endogenous growth model with (i) physical capital as an input in the education sector and (ii) leisure as an additional argument in the utility function. The analysis of the effects of taxation - including income...

It is well known that the take-up rate of the Dutch housing benefit and other means tested benefits is substantially below 100%. In order to measure non-take up one usually has to simulate entitlement to the benefits. In this paper we take a closer look at the quality of the simulation. We find...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary value for individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction as scored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect....

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors’ tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...