This paper provides unprecedented direct evidence from large-scale survey data on both the intensity (how much?) and direction (to whom?) of income comparisons. Income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three-quarters of Europeans. They are associated with both lower...

As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU) it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax-benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the social protection systems of this increase in unemployment. This paper uses the EU...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a...

Very low work intensity and at-risk-of-poverty are two of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Their timeliness is critical for tracing the effectiveness of policy interventions towards reaching this target....

The European welfare states have undergone a significant amount of change over the last decades. In light of the unresolved tensions resulting from changed macroeconomic conditions, the emergence of new social risks as well as from the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftershocks,...

The Syrian Civil War gave rise to the largest refugee flight reaching Europe since the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s. The crisis evidenced the deficiencies of the European Union Asylum Policy, which struggled both to offer solutions to Syrian refugees and to efficiently allocate costs across...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate is one of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Timeliness of this indicator is crucial for monitoring of the social situation and of the effectiveness of tax and benefit policies....

This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version F6.36+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the...

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...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes presented as fiscal consolidation measures in nine EU countries that experienced large budget deficits following the financial crisis of the late 2000s and subsequent economic downturn, using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The nine...