Finding a suitable balance of work and family life is not an easy task for parents who face multiple, and potentially conflicting, demands. Childcare policies play a crucial role in helping parents reconcile care and employment-related tasks. But inconsistent or poorly implemented policies can...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

In this paper we study the effects on the survival rate in employment of a scheme that facilitates gradual retirement through working time reductions. We use information on the entire labour market career and other observables to control for selection and take dynamic treatment assignment into...

Several recent studies show that the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is not a sufficient statistic for the welfare costs of taxation due to factors such as taxbase shifting. This paper provides an additional argument demonstrating the non-sufficiency of the ETI, namely tax deductions....

Macro-based effective tax rate (ETR) measures do not provide information on the level or distribution of marginal effective tax rates thought to influence household behaviour. They also do not capture differences in average ETRs facing different population sub-groups. I use EUROMOD, an EUwide...

Means-tested Social Assistance (SA) benefits play an important role as social protection floors sup-porting households in financial difficulties. This paper presents evidence on the patterns of SA benefit re-ceipt in a selection of OECD and EU countries. It provides an overview of the role of SA...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

In Belgium unemployment insurance benefits can only exhaust for one category of workers: partners of workers with (replacement) labour income (mostly women) may loose their entitlement after an unemployment duration ranging from two to eight years, depending on individual characteristics. We...

This paper utilises a multi-country microsimulation tax-benefit model for Europe, EUROMOD, to simulate the distribution of net replacement rates for 13 European countries. We look at different types of labour market transitions by comparing household incomes in the current state with simulated...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...