Labor force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar, however full-time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. In order to find out to what extent these differences can be attributed to differences in the tax transfer system, we perform a comparative...

We study the effect of family income and maternal hours worked on child development. Our instrumental variable analysis suggests different results for cognitive and behavioral development. An additional 1,000 USD in family income improves cognitive development by 4.4 percent of a standard...

This paper analyzes the relationship between work-promoting policies and child development. First, we provide new comprehensive evidence of the unintended consequences for child development of the Earned Income Tax Credit expansions during the 1990s in the United States. Second, our...

We exploit a recent Swedish tax reform, implying higher marginal tax rates for the top 5% of the earnings distribution, to learn about earnings responses in an economy where taxes already are high. Using a simple and graphical cross sectional method, we estimate earnings elasticities in the...

Recently, a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics. However, to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate, an important component of taxable income, reacts to changes in marginal tax rates....

The modernisation of Swedish households during the twentieth century prompted a considerable productivity growth in household production, which reduced the time input for a fixed volume of routine household work by about 35 per cent 1920-1990. Much of that time was gradually transferred to the...

In times of economic crises, household production, and the unpaid work time associated with it, can serve as a coping mechanism for absorbing the impact of shocks. Evidence from the Great Recession has been supportive of this possibility, and has revealed the presence of gender asymmetries...

Official poverty thresholds are based on the implicit assumption that the household with poverty-level income possesses sufficient time for household production to enable it to reproduce itself as a unit. Several authors have questioned the validity of the assumption and explored alternative...

Many welfare-to-work programs in both North America and Europe are directed at making work pay for the low skilled. This paper identifies two alternative policies that are motivated by this same objective - active labour market programs that involve wage subsidies together with improved job...

The study examines the nature and extent of time poverty experienced by men and women in subsistence households in Mozambique. Gender roles, shaped by patriarchal norms, place heavy work obligations on women. Time-use data from a primary household survey in Mozambique is used for this analysis....