This paper evaluates the impact of a reduction in the child qualifying age criteria for the One Parent Family Payment (OFP) in Ireland. From 2012 to 2015, the child qualifying age for OFP was reduced from 18 years to 7 years. Lone parents who no longer qualified for the payment, based on the age...

While optimization frictions have been shown to attenuate earnings responses to financial incentives, less is understood about the individual factors shaping the response. The main contribution of this paper is to separately quantify the role of learning the tax and benefit schedule versus other...

We document the time-series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the US and seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK) from the early 1980s through 2016. Relying on a model of joint household labor supply...

The evolution of the ratio of direct taxation (characterized by progressive rates) over indirect and payroll taxation (characterized by flat rates) is examined together with its distributional consequences for the Bottom 50%, Middle 40% and Top 10% shares of income. Oscillations of this ratio...

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 17 European countries and the US. Based on a model of joint household decision making, we quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes...

We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...

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 applies the theory of relational contracts to make precise the idea that because households are engaged in a repeated non-cooperative game, Pareto efficient outcomes can be supported by self interest, given the specific pattern of specialisation and exchange which exists in the...

Discrete-choice models of labor supply have become very popular for ex ante evaluations of policy reforms as they easily account for non-convex budget sets. We test the constraints imposed in practice on these models and suggest a fully flexible model that significantly improves fit.