Previous research has shown single mothers to be less well-off and at higher risk of poverty than mothers in couples. In this article, I extend current research by examining how single motherhood affects income at different quantiles of the distribution in twelve rich nations. Using harmonised...

We study the role of old-age pensions, disability insurance and healthcare in accounting for the differing labor supply patterns of older individuals across countries. We develop a life cycle model of labor supply and health with heterogeneous agents. In our framework, people choose when to stop...

We utilise repeated cross sections of micro data from several countries, available from the Luxembourg Income Study, LIS, to estimate labour supply elasticities, both at the intensive and extensive margin. The benefit of the data is that it spans over four decades and includes a large number of...

How adequately did governments protect their citizens over the Great Recession? The recent recession, the worst since the Great Depression, provides an opportune moment to investigate the adequacy and fairness of countries' responses to an economic crisis. Using household-level LIS data from...

We use social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years, we find that most of...

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning four decades) to examine trends within countries over time and between...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

This paper analyses government instruments in terms of reducing market inequality. Government redistribution, realized through public spending and taxation, could be considered as a key element in order to ensure a more equal distribution of income between households. The first part of the paper...

Most welfare states design their tax/benefit system to combat income poverty. Some countries are more effective in poverty alleviation than others. What can explain these variations in outcomes and effectiveness? And has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time and...

Using observational micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we assess the redistributive impact of tax and transfer configurations across 22 OECD countries for the period 1999-2013. After recovering new tax data (employer social contributions), we measure the reduction of income...