Earning an income is probably the best way of avoiding poverty and social exclusion, hence the recent trend of promoting employment through in-work transfers in OECD countries. Yet, the relative consensus on the need for `making work pay' policies is muddied by a number of concerns relative to...

Discrete-choice models provide a tractable method and a simple way to represent utility-maximizing labor supply decisions in the presence of highly nonlinear and possibly non-convex budget constraints. Thus, it is not surprising that they are so extensively used for ex-ante evaluation of...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the within-household distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women’s outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time...

Social assistance and inactivity traps have long been considered amongst the main causes of the poor employment performance of EU countries. The success of New Labour has triggered a growing interest in instruments capable of combining the promotion of responsibility and self-sufficiency with...

[eng] Going beyond mere case studies, this paper proposes a “ life-size” analysis of the prime pour l’emploi (earned income tax credit) using the SYSIFF98 microsimulation model. The first step is to set the PPE in perspective in relation to other suggested measures (allocation...

For policy makers and analysts, it is important to isolate the redistributive impact of tax-benefit reforms from changes in the environment in which policies operate. When actual reforms are motivated by work incentives, it is also crucial to evaluate behavioural responses and the distributional...

The main objectives of social assistance benefits, including poverty alleviation and labor-market or social reintegration, can be seriously compromised if support is difficult to access. While recent studies point to high non-take-up rates, existing evidence does not make full use of the...

Following the report of the Stiglitz Commission, measuring and comparing well-being across countries has gained renewed interest. Yet, analyses that go beyond income and incorporate non-market dimensions of welfare most often rely on the assumption of identical preferences to avoid the...