We compare the distributional effects of austerity measures that have been introduced in 6 EU countries in the period of large government budget deficits following the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. We explore the effects of policy changes presented as austerity...

We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their systems to support families with children: Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom. The structure of these systems is different: Austria gives emphasis to universal benefits, Spain to tax...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU) vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their redistributive effects using EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. As well as describing redistributive effects in...

This paper aims to analyse the social assistance systems in five South European countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. After reviewing the existing system of social assistance in each country, we apply a consistent methodology in order to estimate its impact on income...

In this paper we treat an individual's health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual's health sheds new...

We analyze the consequences for sickness absence of a selective softening of job security legislation for small firms in Sweden in 2001. According to our differences-in-difference estimates, aggregate absence in these firms fell by 0.2-0.3 days per year. This aggregate net figure hides important...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

Spain has one of the lowest expenditures on family social protection, the third highest child poverty and the second lowest fertility rate in the EU. The objective of this paper is to identify and assess tax-benefit reforms that could improve this situation. Using the European microsimulation...

A large literature on ex ante moral hazard in income insurance emphasizes that the individual can affect the probability of an income loss by choice of lifestyle and hence, the degree of risk-taking. The much smaller literature on moral hazard ex post mainly analyzes how a ?moral hazard...