It is frequently claimed that high ATM surcharges actually attract customers to the banks that impose them, particularly if they operate large ATM networks. By exploiting as natural experiments two events associated with the lifting of surcharge bans in Iowa and in the states that neighbor Iowa,...

Policy makers who want to help house low-income families might either fund production of new units or supplement the payments families make for existing units. Conventional wisdom holds that production costs more, but McClure (1998) claimed long-term discounted costs of project-based and...

European welfare states are under considerable stress. On the one hand, the recession has caused unemployment to rise and household incomes to fall, which both raise the demand for social protection. On the other hand, austerity policies and programme reforms affect the capacity of welfare...

The paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the distribution of Aid. We call this concept the income lever and define it as the relation between the welfare of the...

We use a microeconometric model of household labour supply in order to evaluate, with Italian data, the behavioural and welfare effects of gender based taxation (GBT) as compared to other policies based on different optimal taxation principles. The comparison is interesting because GBT, although...

Standard models of fiscal federalism suggest many benefits of decentralization in developing economies, and there has been a recent push toward decentralization around the world. However, developing countries presently still have less decentralization, particularly on the revenue side, than both...

We apply a standard tax and benefit incidence analysis to estimate the impact on inequality and poverty of direct taxes, indirect taxes and subsidies, and social spending (cash and food transfers and in-kind transfers in education and health). The extent of inequality reduction induced by direct...

Many developing countries find it difficult to raise the revenue required to provide such basic public services as education, health care, and infrastructure. Complicating the policy challenges of taxation in developing countries are issues that most developed countries do not face, including...

The poverty risk rate increased in Finland from 7 to 14 per cent between 1993 and 2010. We have estimated the counterfactual poverty rates for the year 2010 in order to evaluate the impact of changes in tax and benefit systems on the increase of the poverty risk rate. Household disposable...

In this paper, I estimate the demand for housing in Bogotá, modeling electricity consumption explicitly to take into account the crossed subsidies included in Colombian utility rates. I use household level data on housing prices, observable dwelling attributes, and demographic variables to...