Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone...

There is a strong intergenerational correlation in welfare participation, but this does not imply that parental welfare receipt induces child receipt. While there are a few quasi-experimental studies that provide estimates of the causal effect of parental welfare participation for children from...

We present the results from a natural experiment in which single mothers on welfare were stimulated to find a job. Two policy instruments were introduced: an earnings disregard and job creation. The experiment was performed at the level of municipalities in The Netherlands, a country with...

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin...

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the non-pecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...

The public finance literature has modeled income shifting as a decision along the intensive margin even though it involves significant fixed costs, giving rise to an important extensive margin. We show that accounting for this extensive margin has crucial policy implications: the classical...

This paper analyses optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between wage rates and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants of across-household heterogeneity in second...

Recent books by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2014) and Anthony Atkinson (Atkinson, 2015) have brought the annual wealth tax back on the policy agenda. Both authors suggest using the annual wealth tax to supplement the redistributional effects of the income tax, assigning it a role as a...

We analyze the effect of income inequality on terrorism for a sample of 114 countries between 1985 and 2012. We provide evidence, robust to various methodological changes (e.g., different dependent variables, instrumental-variable approaches), that higher levels of income inequality are...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-)distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD countries...