Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. The current fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation. The paper investigates the fiscal...

Most of the available comparative empirical evidence on levels and trends in income inequalities and poverty in OECD countries relies on the concept of household disposable cash income, thus ignoring the services governments provide to households. Including those services matters a lot, however,...

As pointed out by the Expert Group on Household Income Statistics (Canberra Group, 2001), the way in which is dealt with the income value of home ownership is crucial for distribution analyses. Home-ownership can have a large impact on a household’s expenditure structure. Because of the large...

Using kernel density estimation we find that over the 1990s business cycles in the United States and Great Britain the entire distribution of after-tax (disposable) income moved to the right while inequality declined. In contrast, Germany and Japan experienced less growth, a rise in inequality,...

The idea governing the transition to a market economy in East Germany-in contrast to other Eastern European countries-was that of using socio-political measures to raise East German living conditions to the higher West German standards. And indeed, the rising living standard and subjective...

Housing is a major component of aggregate demand, and understanding how the demand for housing co-varies with income is useful for analysis and policy. While estimating housing consumption for tenants amounts to observing rents, estimating housing consumption for owner-occupiers is challenging...

We estimate non-cash income from owner occupied housing, subsidized rental housing, or free use of one's main residence and evaluate their impact on the unconditional distribution of household income and selected inequality measures. We confirm the standard finding in the literature that imputed...