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...

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...

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 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...

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...

We examine the relationship between income and health with the purpose of establishing the extent to which the distribution of health in a population contributes to income inequality and is itself a product of that inequality. The evidence supports a substantial impact of ill-health on income,...

Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intrahousehold...