Entrepreneurial activity is often regarded as an engine for economic growth and job creation. Through tax policy, governments possess a potential lever to influence the decisions of economic agents to start and close small businesses. In Germany, the top marginal income tax rates were reduced...

Mircrosimulation models (MSM) and Computable General Equilibrium models (CGE) have both been widely used in policy analysis. The combination of these two model types allows the utilisation of the advantages of both types. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation...

In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich persons' income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to...

We estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of employment, non-employment and retirement that includes endogenous accumulation of human capital and intertemporal non-separabilities in preferences. Additionally, the model accounts for the effect of the tax and transfer system on work...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of a tax policy change on social welfare by using jointly a collective model of household labor supply and a microsimulation program of the French taxbenefit system. The collective approach allows studying the intrahousehold distribution so that for the first...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for policy...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

We study the work hours of Australian couples, using a neoclassical labour-supply model in which couples choose from a small, realistic set of possible wife-husband working hour combinations We introduce three improvements to this standard model. First, we allow partners' preferences about...