Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as "fair" we compare the equivalent...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

Green tax reform is unpopular because, typically, the poor are hurt most by the higher prices of carbon-intensive commodities. If revenues from a carbon tax are recycled, it may be feasible to gain popular support for green tax reform. To investigate this, we estimate an EASI demand system from...

We estimate the implicit disability costs faced by older people, using data on over 8,000 individuals from the UK Family Resources Survey. We extend previous research by using a more flexible statistical modelling approach and by allowing for measurement error in observed disability and standard...

It is common practice to adapt the format of a question to the mode of data collection. Multi-coded questions in self-completion and face-to-face modes tend to be transformed for telephone into a series of 'yes/no' questions. Questions with response scales are often branched in telephone...

We compare three major UK surveys, BHPS, FRS and ELSA, in terms of the picture they give of the relationship between disability and receipt of the Attendance Allowance (AA) benefit. Using the different disability indicators available in each survey, we estimate a model in which probabilities of...

Women are less financially literate than men. It is unclear whether this gap reflects a lack of knowledge or, rather, a lack of confidence. Our survey experiment shows that women tend to disproportionately respond “do not know” to questions measuring financial knowledge, but when this...

This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets,...

Average real UK household income has almost doubled over the past forty years. With four decades of micro-data on household incomes, and relatively simple decomposition methods, we document the contribution to this growth in the mean net household income of working-age households from different...