We analyse the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on EU households' income and assess the cushioning effect of discretionary policy measures taken by the EU Member States. Our assessment is based on the European Commission Spring 2020 forecasts and counterfactual scenarios under a no policy change...

During the last decade, research on income inequality has paid special attention to top income earners. At the same time, top marginal tax rates on upper income earners have declined sharply in many OECD countries. Discussions are still open on the relationship between the increase of the income...

Much of the literature on flat tax reforms has highlighted the benefits of introducing flat personal income tax systems in transition economies. The advocated benefits of flat tax systems range from their simplicity, higher compliance and lower distortionary effects on growth and employment....

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, and Spain based on the first and second wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate...

Policy discussions on pension systems generally focus on their sustainability and design, including retirement age, income reference and contributory period while relative little attention is devoted to the tax treatment of pension contributions and pension benefits. However, tax expenditures -...

The 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme initiated a period of strict international supervision with respect to tax policy in Greece. The country implemented a large-scale fiscal consolidation package, aiming to reduce its public deficit below 3% of GDP by 2016. Since the beginning of the crisis,...

Minimum income schemes are set to provide citizens with a minimum living standard. In Spain, these schemes consist of a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented by the Autonomous Communities. This generates important regional discrepancies among the...

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household income in Austria, using detailed administrative labor market data, in combination with micro-simulation techniques, that enable specific labor market transitions to be modeled. We find that discretionary fiscal policy measures...

This paper analyses the first-round effects of hypothetical minimum wage increases on social outcomes in 21 EU countries with a statutory national minimum wage based on a microsimulation approach using EUROMOD. The methodological challenges related to the use of available EU household survey...

We study a set of tax reforms introducing a budget-neutral tax shift in Italy, from labour income to consumption taxes. To this end we use a microsimulation model to provide the output with which to estimate the parameters of tax functions in an overlapping-generations computable general...