The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of fiscal policy on the economic resources available to children, and on the child poverty rate. A static microsimulation model specifically designed for the purposes of comparative fiscal analysis in the European Union, EUROMOD, is used to...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed redistributive effect for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countries that are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognised that they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men on average under...

This paper presents an evaluation of the tax-transfer treatment of married couples in 15 EU countries using the EUROMOD microsimulation model. First, we show that many tax-transfer schemes in Europe feature negative jointness defined as a situation where the tax rate on one person depends...

We compare three EU countries that have recently experienced substantial but very different reforms of their family support systems: Austria, Spain and the UK. The structure of these systems is different: Austria emphases universal benefits, Spain tax concessions and the UK means-tested...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed redistributive effect for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

EUROMOD is a 15-country tax-benefit microsimulation model based on national household micro-data. It is designed to estimate the revenue and distributional effects of national or EUwide changes in social and fiscal policy. In order to provide European results, and for results at the national...

Using evidence from the European Community Household Panel we find that family benefits vary in their importance to household incomes and in the prevention of child poverty across Europe. In one group of countries family benefits appear to have a significant effect on the protection of children...

Over the past 20 years, microsimulation models have come to play an important role in policy analysis, identifying gainers and losers, and characterising the effect on incentives. A natural development of national models is a Europe-wide tax benefit model. The present paper reports results from...