"The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions....

This paper examines the evolution of the redistributive role of the State in Brazil at the beginning of the 21st century. For this purpose, we compute the marginal effects of the cash transfers, taxes, and in-kind benefits on inequality using the Lerman-Yitzhaki progressivity index. Our main...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

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...