We analyze different options for the design of a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA). We assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the period...

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...

We explore the prospects for using the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) dataset as an underlying micro-database for the EU taxbenefit model, EUROMOD. This will allow expanding the policy domains currently covered in EUROMOD with dimensions like wealth taxation,...

Belgium has seen major changes in its tax-benefit system over the past twenty years. These changes have, to a large extent, co-determined the evolution of disposable incomes of Belgian households on one hand, and their incentives to work on the other. In this paper we assess equity and...

This paper introduces the Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT), a new extension of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union. With HHoT, users can easily create their own hypothetical data, which enables them to better understand how policies work for households with...

Redistribution is usually understood in terms of income; as a way to rank individuals as well as to determine taxable capacity or benefit eligibility. Yet, it is increasingly argued that more prominence should be given to the joint distribution of income and wealth and interest into the taxation...

The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) submitted an order for referral to the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2014, asking it to clarify the compatibility of the "Outright Monetary Transactions" (OMT)-Programme with European Union law. The OMT-Programme prepares...

The 2008-09 crisis has shown that some euro area member countries were unable to sufficiently stabilize their economies which has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze the redistributive and stabilizing effects of two scenarios of fiscal...

Over the last few years concern for income inequality in European countries has increased remarkably. In this context, taxation is an important redistributive instrument and we investigate the redistributive role of direct taxes. We focus on the EU-15 countries and the evolution over the period...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...