The purpose of this paper is to present an exercise where we identify optimal income tax rules under the constraint of fixed tax revenue. To this end, we estimate a microeconomic model with 78 parameters that capture heterogeneity in consumption-leisure preferences for singles and couples as...

This paper holistically addresses the effective (relative) income tax contribution of a given in-come (or, wealth) group. The widely acclaimed standard in public policy is the absolute benefaction of a given income group in filling up the fiscal coffers. Instead, we focus on the ratio of the...

The purpose of the paper is to provide a discussion of the various approaches for accounting for labour supply responses in microsimulation models. The paper focuses attention on two methodologies for modelling labour supply: the discrete choice model and the random utility – random...

Public debates about the rise in top income shares often focus on the growing dispersion in earnings and the soaring pay for top executives and financial-sector employees. But can the change in the marginal distribution of earnings on its own explain the rise in top income shares? Are top...

We examine the impact of real oil price shocks on labor market flows in the U.S. We first use smooth transition regression (STR) models to investigate to what extent oil prices can be considered as a driving force of labor market fluctuations. Then we develop and calibrate a modified version of...

In a Walrasian labor market, the labor income share is constant under the assumptions of a Cobb-Douglas production function and perfect competition. Given the observed decline of the labor share in recent decades, this paper relaxes these assumptions, proposes a time-series calculation of the...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking and quantifying the extent of deprivation exhibited by multidimensional distributions, where the multiple attributes in which an individual can be deprived are represented by dichotomized variables. To this end we first aggregate deprivation...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations Aaberge (2009) introduced two...

This paper proposes a two-step aggregation method for measuring long-term income inequality and income mobility, where mobility is defined as an equalizer of long-term income. The first step consists of aggregating the income stream of each individual into a measure of permanent income, which...

In this paper, we introduce and apply a general framework for evaluating long-term income distributions according to the Equality of Opportunity principle. Our framework allows for both an ex-ante and an ex-post approach to EOp. Our ex-post approach relies on a permanent income measure defined...