This paper examines how a metropolitan area's job growth affects its income distribution. The research uses annual Current Population Survey data on the income distribution in different metropolitan areas from 1979 through 1988. Faster metropolitan job growth increases real family income in the...

Using panel data on U.S. MSAs, this paper estimates how a typical MSA's wages of different demographic groups, and prices, are affected by overall MSA unemployment, the distribution of unemployment among different groups, and national prices and wages. MSA unemployment has strong effects on MSA...

Inner-city business development is often proposed as a solution to inner-city poverty. However, research evidence suggests that creating new jobs in the inner city is unlikely by itself to significantly increase the employment or earnings of the inner city poor. Public subsidies for inner city...

The severe economic crisis affecting Greece is widely expected to have a significant social impact in terms of greater inequality and increased poverty. We provide an early assessment of whether (and to what extent) this is the case. More specifically, we distinguish between two inter-related...

As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU) it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax-benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the social protection systems of this increase in unemployment. This paper uses the EU...

Static microsimulation models are based on household micro-data and are designed to estimate the revenue cost and distributional and incentive effects of tax and benefit policy changes. They are invaluable for the design and evaluation of policy reforms. Static models allow us to hold constant...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether policy reforms in Austria between 1998 and 2005 were successful in meeting redistributive objectives and in reducing poverty. For the analysis we use the tax/benefit micro-simulation model EUROMOD. Due to the sequence of reforms and the use of two...

Using evidence from the European Community Household Panel we find that family benefits vary in their importance to household incomes and in the prevention of child poverty across Europe. In one group of countries family benefits appear to have a significant effect on the protection of children...

Over the past 20 years, microsimulation models have come to play an important role in policy analysis, identifying gainers and losers, and characterising the effect on incentives. A natural development of national models is a Europe-wide tax benefit model. The present paper reports results from...

By increasing the labor supply of welfare recipients, welfare reform may reduce wages and increase unemployment among other less-educated groups. These "spillover effects" are difficult to estimate because welfare caseloads decrease in response to improvements in the economy, which leads...