Western countries' income tax systems exempt the return from investing in owner-occupied housing. Returns from other investments are instead taxed, thus distorting households' portfolio choices, although it is argued that housing property taxation might act as a counterbalance. Based on data...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

The Italian Great Recession has a double-dip pattern. After the start of the global financial crisis, Italy experienced a second serious recession in 2011 because of the sovereign debt crisis. The reaction of Italian governments was mild at the beginning and more convinced since the start of the...

In order to alleviate child poverty, contemporary European welfare states have shifted their focus increasingly towards child-centred investment strategies. However, studies assessing the generosity of welfare states to families with children focus mainly on the role of cash benefit packages, or...

Most studies using microsimulation techniques have considered the effect of potential reforms, but only regarding income distribution. However, it has become increasingly recognised, both at the academic and political level, that focusing purely on income provides a limited picture of social...

This paper aims to show how the newly developed Hypothetical Household Tool of the EUROMOD microsimulation model can be used to generate institutional minimum income protection indicators. It does so by updating the CSB's Minimum Income Protection Indicators (CSB-MIPI) dataset using EUROMOD and...

Less visible than benefit expenditure, spending channelled through the tax system via tax concessions and advantages can amount to substantial amounts of foregone revenue. In this paper we use EUROMOD, a tax-benefit micro-simulation model covering all EU member states, to investigate the size...

More than half of the EU countries have become poorer and more unequal since the start of the crisis in 2008. Despite lack of timely household micro data, using microsimulation techniques with up-to-date information on policy rules enables us to estimate the direct effect of tax-benefit policy...

We investigate the impact of the Romanian and Czech family policy systems on the income distribution and poverty risk of families with children. We focus on separating out the effects of the policy design itself, size of the benefits and the interaction between policies and population...

This paper discusses an application of re-weighting to account for demographic change within a comparative micro-simulation setting. We use the Slovenian and Lithuanian components of the EUROMOD micro-simulation model with data referring to demographic characteristics of the population in 2010...