Institutional early childhood education and care can be funded and delivered in various ways relying on both the public and the private sector. The provision of childcare ranges from public operation to mixed markets with public and private providers to considerably marketised systems with...

Universal child care that is available, affordable and of good quality is regarded as a key instrument of a country's social and labor market policy. As full public involvement in the provision of child care is costly, licensing non-public providers can enlarges parental choice and relieve...

A simple Tiebout model is presented where states provide university education to both immobile and mobile students. State governments choose the quality of public universities by trading off the value of education for the local immobile student population and the costs, net of tuition revenues,...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes except for Luxembourg according to features related to...

Consumption based equivalence scales are estimated by applying the extended partially linear model (EPLM) to the 1998 Income and Consumption Survey (EVS) carried out in Germany. In this model the equivalence scales are identified by virtue of nonlinearities in household demand. Therefore, the...

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on the welfare state and on individual attitudes. The outcome variables that we cover in the survey are on the one hand public spending, and on the other hand individual attitudes and behaviour, including charity...

Consumption based equivalence scales are estimated by applying the extended partially linear model (EPLM) to the 1998 Income and Consumption Survey (EVS) of Germany. The chosen flexible semiparametric specification is able to capture a large variety of functional forms of household expenditure...