This chapter gives an overview of the male labour supply literature, focusing on what that literature implies for the design of the tax-transfer system. According to conventional wisdom, male labour supply is rather insensitive to tax rates. This, in turn, implies that the welfare losses from...

The response of aggregate labor supply to various changes in the economic environment is central to many economic issues, especially the optimal design of tax policies. Conventional wisdom based on studies in the 1980s and 1990s has long held that the analysis of micro data leads one to conclude...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but...

In general, most countries of the former Eastern bloc have experienced poor growth performance and large increases in income inequality during the transition process. The most obvious success story in the process of transition to date has been Poland, which has outstripped other transition...