We provide an overview of microsimulation approaches for assessing the effects of policy on income distribution. We focus on the role of tax-benefit policies and review the concept of microsimulation and how it contributes to the analysis of income distribution in general and policy evaluation...

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household...

Tax Liability Side Equivalence (tax LSE) claims that the statutory incidence of a tax is irrelevant for its economic incidence. In gift-exchange labor markets, firms provide a gift to workers by paying high wages, and workers reciprocate by providing high efforts. Tax LSE is theoretically...

This paper studies the design of tax systems that implement a planner's second-best allocation in a market economy. An example shows that the widely used Mirrleesian (1976) tax system cannot implement all incentive-compatible allocations. Hammond's (1979) "principle of taxation" proves that any...

This paper studies the implications of monopsony power for optimal income taxation and welfare. Firms observe workers' abilities while the government does not and monopsony power determines what share of the labor market surplus is translated into profits. Monopsony power increases the tax...

With panel data important issues can be resolved that can not beaddressed with cross--sectional data. A major drawback is that paneldata suffer from more severe missing data problems. Adding a sampleconsisting of new units randomly drawn from the original populationas replacements for units who...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

We perform a comparative analysis of five incentivized tasks used to elicit risk preferences. Theoretically, we compare the elicitation methods in terms of completeness of the range of the estimates as well as their precision, the likelihood of triggering loss aversion, and problems arising when...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...