This paper assesses Italy’s 2019 tax and benefit reforms, analyses hypothetical reforms and proposes a reform package that balances goals of reducing poverty, encouraging employment and fiscal sustainability. Using the OECD’s Tax-Benefit and the EUROMOD microsimulation models, it shows that...

We investigate the short-term labor supply responses to a Conditional Cash Transfers program in Peru. Rather than comparing treated and non-treated households, we examine how benefit recipients change their labor supply after receiving the cash transfer. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous...

In this paper, we estimate the impact on female labor force participation of a massive conditional cash transfer program-Universal Child Allowance, AUH-launched in Argentina in 2009. We identify the intention-to-treat effect by comparing eligible and non-eligible women over time through a...

The basic economic model of labor supply has a very clear prediction of what we should expect when an adult receives an unexpected cash windfall: they should work less and earn less. This intuition underlies concerns that many types of cash transfers, ranging from government benefits to migrant...

Taking advantage of a reform that made Chile’s most popular conditional cash transfer program substantially more generous, I study its impact on mothers’ labor supply using a difference-in-difference strategy. Previous research has focused on these effects near the inauguration of CCTs,...

In-work support through the tax-benefit system has proved to be an effective way of increasing the labor supply of lone mothers and first earners in couples in a number of OECD countries. At the same time, these instruments usually create negative employment incentives for secondary earners....

Italy has the lowest labor supply of married women among EU countries. Moreover, the participation rate of married women is positively correlated with their husbands' income. We show that these two features can be partly explained by the tax system: a high tax rate together with tax credits and...

We study the role of cognitive ability for individuals’ tax responsiveness using linked administrative tax and military enlistment registers. Our main finding is that individuals in the top decile of the ability distribution react twice as strong to a large and salient kink point in the...

Two traditional options for reforming Ehegattensplitting, the joint taxation of married couples with full income splitting, are de facto income splitting (Realsplitting) or individual taxation with a transferable personal allowance. However, these proposals do not significantly reduce the...

The merits of alternative income tax policies depend on the population distribution of preferences for income and leisure. Standard theory, which supposes that persons want more income and more leisure, does not predict how they resolve the tension between these desires. Empirical studies of...