Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of substituting the weaker absolute...

The Netherlands has a unique tradition in which all major Dutch political parties provide CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis with highly detailed proposals for the tax-benefit system in every national election. This information allows us to quantitatively measure the...

It is well known that income and health are positively associated. Much less is known about the strength of this association in times of growth and recession. We develop a novel decomposition method that focuses on isolating the roles played by government transfers versus market transfers on...